Nobody laughed like that at the Misses Stone's --certainly no low-voiced, quietly conducted teacher. Rose was further aggrieved and tormented by the astonished heads privily raised, and the wondering eyes covertly looking at her. She laughed no more. She went on examining, commending, correcting, till she was tired out. Surely the morning hours were endless that day. She was exhausted, not merely by the "smart walk" from Welby Square, which, taken at Hester Jennings's pace, was always tiring, as Rose knew to her cost, but also by the turmoil of spirit she had been in. All the toils, disappointments, and drudgery of the life which lay before her seemed suddenly to press upon her and overwhelm her, and before she knew what she was doing she was sobbing behind her handkerchief. She had one grain of sense left, she turned her back; but her heaving shoulders and the muffled sound of a "good cry" were not hidden from the electrified class. Nobody cried like that at the Misses Stone's, unless it might be to somebody's pillow in the darkness of the night. For any teacher to cry in her class was unheard of. Rose conquered herself in less time than it has taken to recount her weakness, and resumed the lesson with moist eyes, a reddened nose, and her whole girlish body tingling and smarting with girlish mortification. All the rest of the morning she seemed to hear two startling statements repeated alternately and without pause. "Miss Rose Millar laughed loudly in the middle of her teaching;" and oh! shame of shames, for the womanly dignity of the last year of Rose's teens--"Miss Rose Millar cried before the whole class." Rose had once joined in a girls' play, full of girlish cleverness and girlish points and hits. No less a personage than Queen Elizabeth was introduced into it. In the course of the plot great stress was laid on the fact that the Queen had laughed at Lord Essex's expense, behind his back. This was done in order to pique the proud, spoilt young courtier to resent the laughter, and, in homely parlance, to give Her Majesty more to laugh at. The phrase "_and the Queen laughed_," had been emphatically repeated again and again in Lord Essex's hearing, with much malicious meaning and effect. That mocking quotation was resounding in Rose's ears with a characteristic variation. It was no longer "_and the Queen laughed_," it was "and Miss Rose Millar laughed," then alas! alas! as a fit pendant, "and Miss Rose Millar cried."