Mademoiselle swung round upon the daïs and looked hard at Joey, standing up in her place, rather frightened and very floundering about the French, but sturdily determined to go through with the business she had undertaken. Mademoiselle heard her out, with no comment bad or good till she reached the word "français," then suddenly her heavy black eyes gave a great flash. "You are, I think, a new girl, and therefore scarcely know, perhaps, how great an impertinence you commit," she said very quietly, but in a voice that was more dreadful than if she had screamed. "But any girl that is worthy of the name of English should understand that to ask a Frenchwoman, who has seen and remembers, to _amuse_ her with stories of the time when France was trodden in the dust by _swine_, is to make an insult that can nefare be forgotten. Leave the classroom; I will not teach such a girl. Sybil, impart to me your views on the best length for summer holidays--perhaps that will not be beyond your range of intellect." Joey heard no more; somehow she reached the door and stumbled out, feeling so indelibly disgraced that she had serious thoughts of taking the next train home. Now she came to think about it, it _was_ a hopeless thing that she had said; how would she have liked it if the girls had asked her, Joey, to tell them a funny story about prisoners of war in German hands. Of course they were the same Germans--at least the fathers of the horrible Huns who had tortured the wounded and prisoners, and hurt little children like Tiddles. And Joey had used that word _amusante_, when Mademoiselle remembered things--perhaps as bad as the things which Mums had never wished the children to read in the newspapers. "If I knew more French I shouldn't have put it so _horribly_," poor Joey said to herself; but it didn't occur to her to blame Noreen and Syb and Barbara who had suggested this unfortunate plan in the first instance. She wandered up and down the passage in a kind of frenzy; she would have to go home, but honour demanded one should first wipe the floor with oneself before the outraged Maddy. Joey thought no French lesson could ever have been half so long; she couldn't go away from that rather dreary and viewless passage, because she might miss Maddy when she came out. The temporary mistress who was taking Miss Craigie's place would go to the classroom as soon as Maddy had finished; that was all Joey knew. At last there were steps along the passage, but it was the Senior Prefect who came in sight. She had a little three-cornered note in her hand, and was evidently in a hurry. "Is Mademoiselle still with Remove II. B?" she asked briskly, and then as Joey murmured "Yes," she looked at her. "It's the scholarship kid, isn't it? But why aren't you in class?" "I was turned out," Joey mentioned in a low voice. "Then you must have been behaving like a young silly," Ingrid told her crushingly; and then perhaps she saw the utter misery in Joey's face.