Tidying (she called it tidying!) this delectable wardrobe that day, what should Laura come upon but a fat bundle which, deposited with the dumb eloquence of a retriever on Mrs. Cloud’s lap, was deprived of its elastic band and displayed to her as a sheaf of reports—Justin’s reports at his preparatory school. She was allowed to go through them, and because she could not help wheedling explanations out of a particularly busy Mrs. Cloud, to read to herself a few, a very few, of Justin’s letters home. Here was literature indeed! There was Shakespeare, no doubt: there was the _B. O. P._ There was Louisa Alcott and Sir Thomas Malory; but what were such scribblers then to Laura reading Justin’s letters home? To top that revelation came _Stalky and Co._ for a birthday present. Naturally she dreamed of going to school herself. In that mood Aunt Adela surprised her, and, striking while the iron was hot, settled matters with her, with her own friend, and with Papa, who wrote, in grim silence, the necessary cheques. He had never approved of boarding schools for his women-folk. Neither did Laura. The door of the prim drawing-room had not closed behind Aunt Adela, she had barely rubbed Aunt Adela’s farewells from her cheeks, before she had realized that she had been trapped again, that she hadn’t intended to go to school, that she would never meet _Beetle_ at ‘The Laburnums,’ and that she was stuck there for a term at least, because, when there is a chance that they may be read by Mrs. Cloud who would tell Justin, one does not fill one’s letters home with supplications and lamentings. Justin never once said that he wanted to come back!... Finally, she was going to be horribly homesick.... She was. She was put into the lowest class and she hated every one. Exile, of the body or of the mind, always roused, and always will rouse in her, I think, a bitter, ardent devil, that, when she was a child, was completely beyond her comprehension or control. She, who was all for peace and pleasantry and quiet life, found herself involved in wars and rumours of wars, in quarrels and injustice and defiances, that stamped themselves heavily, like a blind pattern, upon a solid background of nostalgia, so that she spent her days, like any cat, fighting and dreaming. She endured for a full term: packed, in spite of protests, all her property at the end of it: bade a polite and final farewell to a bewildered head-mistress, and then came home again. Once there, she refused to budge.