"There's a great deal of noise in here," remarked Miss Ormerod, which was hardly a correct statement, for her entrance had produced an instant and ghastly silence. Lesbia, blushing and confused, explained the cause of the disturbance, showing the remains of the queen wasp as proof. "I'm astonished at your making such an absurd fuss," frowned Miss Ormerod at the form. "Now, let me see how quietly you can get along with your work. Please go on," nodding to Lesbia. To see Miss Ormerod sitting down on the teacher's chair, evidently intending to stop and listen, gave poor Lesbia what she afterwards described as "umpteen spasms". To deliver a lesson under the eye of the Principal was an ordeal for any junior assistant mistress even if she were well prepared. And, alas! Lesbia was not prepared at all. She had been busy with her own Latin and botany the night before, and had trusted to luck to get through the geography class with IIB. She was supposed to be teaching them the natural features of France, so she hurriedly drew an outline of that country upon the blackboard, and commenced to mark in the principal mountains and rivers, aided by stealthy glances at the map. She knew their general direction, but in her embarrassment she could not remember their names, and the book--on which she had pinned her trust--was in Miss Ormerod's hand. Now it was a canon of the school that mistresses should have their own subjects at their finger-ends, and teach their lessons in the form of lectures, without constant reference to notes. By all good rights Lesbia ought to have been able to reel off the physical features of France as easily as she could repeat the multiplication table, but her wretched memory was an absolute blank. The sight of Miss Ormerod sitting there and directing what seemed the full telescopic power of her spectacles upon the blackboard, wiped away any fragments of knowledge which lingered in her agitated brain. She flushed and faltered, and tried to look at the map, and was in such a palpable quandary that, to save the situation, the Principal interfered. "If you don't feel well," she remarked sternly, "you had better sit down, and _I_'ll take the lesson." With trembling knees and racing pulse Lesbia sank on to the chair, and listened in deep humiliation while Miss Ormerod, without any assistance from the book, gave an excellent geography lesson. The girls were models of attention and intelligence, and everything which they ought to have been, but never were, under their junior teacher. Lesbia hardly knew them for the same form. "I shall hear about this from Miss Ormerod," she ruminated. "I don't suppose for a moment this is the end of it."