Bella went to the schoolroom to grapple with the unruly young Pipers, sick at heart. All her misery was Mrs. Dulcimer’s fault, she thought, not taking into consideration her own readiness to lend herself to Mrs. Dulcimer’s plans. There was only one ray of comfort, a lurid and unholy light, in the dark gulf of her thoughts. If Cyril had gone away taking her hopes with him, he had left Beatrix also hopeless. There was an end of the tie between those two. If he had meant to marry Miss Harefield he would not have left Little Yafford. She dragged herself through the lesson, somehow, beating time to Elizabeth Fry’s performance of the classic melody of Trab, Trab, with somebody’s variations--the variations of an ancient and stereotyped order, first triplets, then little stunted runs, then octaves, then a dismal minor, all in chords, and then a general banging and flare-up for a finale. The piece was hideous, and Elizabeth Fry’s playing was a degree worse than the piece. Bella’s head ached woefully by the time her pupil had pounded through the brilliant finale, but she bore up heroically, and heard Horne Tooke read about William the Conqueror in a drawling voice--with a nasal _ad libitum_ accompaniment. These children never seemed to get beyond William the Conqueror and his immediate posterity. Their historical ideas were strictly feudal, and it must have appeared to them only yesterday when the curfew was heard from every church tower, and Peter the Hermit was kindling the souls of Christians with his war-cry of _Deus vult_. Bella stopped to see the little Pipers safely through their early dinner, the table of these juveniles being as much a scene of strife and contention as any battle-field in history. It was a hard matter to preserve some semblance of peace, still harder to inculcate anything approaching good manners, the young Pipers having entered the world with an incapacity for using spoons, forks, knives, or other implements of civilized life in a decent manner. The battle-field was generally flooded before dinner was over--not with the gore of the combatants, but with Brougham’s stout, or with Elizabeth’s regulation glass of old port, or a sauce boat that had capsized in a struggle to get it ‘first,’ or a mustard-pot turned over in a free fight. Bella had a little more influence over these barbarians than the servants, who, coming and going like the wind, were of no authority; but to-day Bella sat at the head of the table looking straight before her, and allowed the young Pipers to squabble, snatch, push, and kick one another to their heart’s content. She was thinking of that ideal vicarage which might have been hers in the future if Cyril Culverhouse had only cared for her. ‘He might have chosen me if his heart had been free,’ she reflected. ‘Everybody tells me I am pretty; even Mr. Piper, coarse and common as he is, always compliments me about my looks. Why should not Cyril have liked me?’