I could see Monica’s shoulders shaking though her face was preternaturally solemn. I felt quite ill with suppressed laughter. I tried to remember all the things I had been taught to think about in church, but I was in that weak state I couldn’t stop giggling. The next Psalm began with the question: ’Are your minds set upon righteousness, O ye congregation.’ I felt neither Monica nor I could answer in the affirmative. After a while my eyes stopped running and I was able to attend a little better. Then we had the second lesson. It was Acts xxvii, all about the shipwreck of St Paul. I noticed poor old Admiral Stopford, who is a bit weak in the head, was getting very fidgety. His nurse whispered to him once or twice, but in vain, for when the vicar read how they cast the cargo over to lighten the ship he suddenly got up and said loudly,— ’Never ought to have been necessary, bad navigation, bad navigation.’ His nurse hurried him out, purple in the face, and Monica and I followed. I felt if I couldn’t laugh aloud I should spontaneously combust. We found a flat tombstone in a secluded part of the churchyard on which we sat and rocked. On arriving back at the house there was a most frightful row because one of the neighbours had telephoned to say that he had seen us in the garden in the early morning. The head mistress said we had brought disgrace on the school and that I was the chief offender. She telegraphed to father,— ’Seriously worried about your daughter come the first thing on Monday.’ Daddy was frantic and thought that I was dying, and wired to Ross at Harrow to go to Hampstead at once, and that he would come up by the first train he could catch. Ross was out, so he only got to the school half an hour before father. Meantime Aunt Amelia had been sent for, and I was in the head mistress’s room being rowed when Ross was announced. He looked quite old as he came in and said, ’Is my sister still alive?’ He was so relieved when he saw me that he was just going to kiss me, but Aunt Amelia stopped him and said he’d better not. ’Have you got _another_ cold?’ he asked, ’but I’m not afraid of germs.’ Ross wouldn’t sit down because I wasn’t allowed to. I felt like a prisoner at the bar while he was told all my crimes from the beginning of time to ’this last disgraceful episode which could not be passed over.’ Ross could not see their point of view at all. When she told him about the scones he exclaimed, ’But if my sister was hungry surely——?’ and she said, ’But is that any reason why your sister should leave the house in the middle of the night?’ and Aunt Amelia remarked she did not know what my dear dead mother would say if she could know it. My quick hurt then! I know it’s awfully weak-minded to cry when you’re in a row, but I couldn’t stand that bit about mother. Ross seemed to get suddenly about seven feet high and his face went like a granite sphinx, and he put his arm round me and said, ’There darling,’ several times.