"What pleases me, child, doesn't matter," he returned hastily. "I want to see you please others--in the play house I mean." She looked at him wistfully. "But," he continued, "it will be time enough to talk of that when I see how you get on. Now is it all settled? You're leaving this place and your mother of your own free will--isn't that so?" Lavinia said nothing, but pinched her lips and nodded her head vigorously. The action was sufficiently expressive and Gay was satisfied. Three days went by. Her Grace of Queensberry's maid, a hard-faced Scotswoman who was not to be intimidated nor betrayed into confidences, superintended Lavinia's shopping and turned a deaf ear to Mrs. Fenton's scoffs and innuendoes. The girl was transformed. Her new gowns, hats, aprons, and what not sent her into high spirits and she bade her mother adieu with a light heart. "Go your own way, you ungrateful minx," was Mrs. Fenton's parting shot, "and when you're tired of your fine gentleman or he's tired of you, don't think you're coming back here 'cause I won't have you." Lavinia smiled triumphantly and tripped into the hackney coach that was awaiting her. CHAPTER III "OH, MISTRESS MINE, WHERE ART THOU ROAMING?" "Lavina! Have done!" It was a whispered entreaty. The victim of the feather of a quill pen tickling her neck dared not raise her voice. Miss Pinwell, the proprietress of the extremely genteel seminary for young ladies, Queen Square--quite an aristocratic retreat some two hundred years ago--was pacing the school-room. Her cold, sharp eyes roamed over the shapely heads--black, golden, brown, auburn, flaxen--of some thirty girls--eager to detect any sign of levity and prompt to inflict summary punishment. "Miss Fenton, why are you not working?" came the inquiry sharply from Miss Pinwell's thin lips. Lavinia Fenton withdrew the instrument of torture and Priscilla Coupland's neck was left in peace. It was done so swiftly that Miss Pinwell's glance, keen as it was, never detected the movement. But the lady had her suspicions nevertheless, and she marched with the erectness of a grenadier to where Lavinia Fenton sat with her eyes fixed upon her copy book, apparently absorbed in inscribing over and over again the moral maxim at the top of the page, and, it may be hoped, engrafting it on her mind. The young lady's industry did not deceive Miss Pinwell. Lavinia Fenton was the black sheep--lamb perhaps is a more fitting word, she was but seventeen--of the school. But somehow her peccadilloes were always forgiven. She had a smile against which severity--even Miss Pinwell's--was powerless. "What were you doing just now when you were not writing?"