But this constant change of governesses over which I rejoiced, and which was chiefly my doing, was by no means equally agreeable to Lady Trecastle. When an instructress went, it was she who had to procure a successor, and she did not find it at all amusing to be incessantly answering advertisements, writing for characters, and that sort of thing. And as, notwithstanding the difficulty of ever actually proving a misdemeanour against me, she had strong doubts of my innocence, therefore she considered me responsible for the bother she continually had about governesses, and regarded me with increased disfavour on that account. She had the sense to suspect that there would not be such endless storms in the schoolroom if the pupil were not unusually unmanageable and turbulent; and, acting on that opinion, she made several efforts to induce me to be more tractable, in order that thereby she might be saved the trouble that my conduct entailed upon her. At one time she tried the effect of addressing serious rebukes and admonitions to me; but I cared not one straw for them. Then she increased the strictness of my confinement, and ordained that every disturbance should always be followed by the loss of the next half-holiday or other pleasure of which I might have a chance; but still I remained unsubdued. Then a third method of overcoming me suddenly struck her, and she one day wound up a lengthy scolding by declaring that her patience was at an end, that she would _not_ stand the perpetual commotions I caused any longer, and that the very next time one occurred I should be packed off to some school at once. Now it was all very well for her to talk big of sending me to school; but in point of fact I felt pretty sure that she would do nothing of the kind, because it was very convenient to her to have a governess in the house on account of her own two daughters, for whom she did not want to go to the expense of masters, and who often needed assistance in the various accomplishments she wished them to acquire. This assistance they were in the habit of receiving from whoever happened to be in charge of me, though they were too old to be regularly in the schoolroom, and as my going to school would remove the ostensible reason for having a governess at Castle Manor, it was not at all likely that she meant to do what she said. But though she knew the threat to be an empty one, that did not at all hinder her from uttering it. Being at her wits' end for something to hold over me _in terrorem_, it suddenly occurred to her that a girl who had always lived with her own belongings, as I had done, would probably dread the notion of being sent away alone amongst strangers, and that therefore the school project stood a very good chance of awing me into submission.