Hester bore the alteration with apparent equanimity, but she took a resolution and acted upon it. She was a musician by nature, and music was the one branch of study to which she had taken with avidity, and which she had pursued with unrelaxed industry. She went to the schoolmistress (the establishment had not yet attained to the distinction of possessing a "lady principal"), and asked her to put her in the immediately-to-be-vacated place of a pupil-teacher, allowing her to continue her own music and singing lessons as an equivalent for her services. The proposition took Miss Nickson by surprise; but she knew Hester Gould's abilities and popularity, and though she did not like the girl particularly, she trusted her fully. It never occurred to the schoolmistress--a simple woman, and a favourable specimen of a generally disagreeable class--that Hester had not made the proposition at her aunt's suggestion, while that young lady contented herself with informing Miss Lavinia Gould by letter of what she had done. "I don't lose caste by it here, where they all know me and I have been on equal terms with them," thought Hester; "and my only chance of getting out of our odious mean existence is by making all I can of such education as I can get. I shall have to teach anyhow, and I can fit myself for teaching a better class of people here." It was not a stupid calculation for so young a head, and it turned out perfectly correct. Hester did not lose caste when her schoolfellows became her pupils, and her teachers in their turn took additional pains with her when they knew the object with which she was learning.