Sixteen sulky girls, feeling they had a real grievance, wrote down the unaccustomed words, with an ostentatious accompaniment of shrugging of shoulders, tapping of foreheads, nibbling of pen-holders, and other signals of mental distress. "If we all get bad marks for dictation it won't be _our_ faults," remarked Edie Browne in injured tones. "You'll get a mark for bad conduct if you speak again!" snapped Lesbia. For a moment or two there was silence, only broken by the sound of scratching pens. Then again came a piping voice. "Do blots count? My ink's so thick it's made three smudges." "Be as careful as you can," temporized Lesbia. Dorothy sighed gustily, took her ink-pot out of its well, inspected it, stirred it up with her pen, and placed it on the top of her desk. At the very next dip she upset it, and its contents spread in a black stream over her exercise-book. "_Dor_-othy!" Lesbia's voice rose to crescendo at the spectacle of the delinquent, her sleeves soaked in ink, trying to dab up the mess with a morsel of blotting-paper and a pink-edged pocket handkerchief. She hastily came to the rescue with the duster from the blackboard, which dispersed a shower of chalk over the already injured costume of her maladroit pupil. "Go and wash your hands at once!" she ordered, replacing the now empty ink-pot in its well, and putting the exercise-book to dry by the fire. "I'm astonished at such carelessness!" Dorothy obeyed with something very like a surreptitious wink at her comrades. The form regarded her with an expression almost approaching admiration. One would judge the unspoken thought of each to be: "Why did not _I_ think of such a lovely thing as to upset the ink and get sent to wash my hands instead of doing horrid dictation?" After disposing of this interruption, Lesbia continued with the adventures of Sir Samuel Baker, despite the long words, refusing even to give the spelling of proper names, such as Nyanza and Gondokoro, declaring that all had an equal chance of getting them right. "Or wrong!" growled Gwennie, under her breath. "It's a quarter to eleven; and we always begin to correct them," volunteered the officious Jess Morrison. Lesbia glared in her direction, but accepted the hint. It would need due time to correct the crop of mistakes which might certainly be expected. "Change books!" she commanded, and, when the transfer had been effected, proceeded to go through the paragraphs, spelling the words, in the midst of which process arrived Dorothy (still with ink-stained sleeves though with cleaner fingers), who promptly asked her to begin again at the beginning as she had lost half. There are limits to patience, and Lesbia's was at an end. "You'll sit down and take 'missed' for your dictation, Dorothy Holding! Do you think I'm going to delay the form on your account? If I've any more trouble with you you'll go to Miss Tatham. Do you understand?"