‘Oh, mother! I told you till I was tired telling you. I told you she was a lady. Well, what business had a lady in our school? But what does all that matter now? Who was she, mother? It is your turn to tell me.’ ‘An old friend, Mab.’ ‘Oh, that I know! But something more, surely? or you would not have been so startled to-day, or so distressed to miss her.’ ‘The distress was selfish,’ said Lady William. ‘She was with me once, at a most important moment of my life; and she can help me better than any one to settle that question with the lawyers about your money, Mab.’ ‘Oh!’ said Mab, ‘She told me she knew my father, and old John, as she called him, and----’ ‘And you never told me, Mab.’ ‘It was in a kind of confidence. And she did not say she knew you; and it was all so mixed up with things--that made me think she oughtn’t to be there, mother, in our school. And yet how could I tell any one, and make her lose her place? And that is why I wanted you to go this morning, to see what you thought; for you would have known in a moment if there was anything wrong.’ ‘And that is why you have been so often at the school of late, my little girl?’ Mab nodded her head, slightly abashed, but yet not shaken in her confidence that it was the right thing. Lady William drew her child into her arms and kissed her. ‘My little girl!’ she repeated, with a soft burst of laughter. And then she put her handkerchief to her eyes, and pushed Mab away and took the tangled work of last night, in which Mab had come to great grief, into her clever hands.