Then she said, gently and regretfully: “No, it is not right. I can’t, of course, tell you what is wrong, but you have made a mistake.” With a hot lump in my throat I would not let break into tears, I rushed off up-stairs, rubbed out every figure of my making, and fell to work anew upon the original example. Except when I obeyed the summons to prayers, I appeared no more below that night. My sister found me bent over the slate when she came up to bed, and said not a word to distract my attention. By ten o’clock the room was so cold that I got an old Scotch plaid of my father’s from the closet, and wrapped myself in it. Still, my limbs were numb and my teeth chattered when, at _one o’clock_ in the morning, I laid the slate by, in the joyous conviction that I had conquered in the fight. I had invented a proof-method of my own—truly ingenious in a child with no turn for mathematics—but this I did not suspect. I honestly believed, instead, that it was an inspiration from Him to whom I had been praying through all the hours of agonized endeavor. I thanked the Author before I slept. When the class was called upon to show their sums next morning, it appeared, to my unspeakable amazement and rapture, that my example and one other—that done by Sarah L., who was backward in figures, although advanced in years—were right, and all the others wrong. The gentle shepherd of our fold took up my slate again when the examination was over, and eyed it sourly, his head on one side, his fingers plucking at his lower lip, a trick which I knew prefaced something particularly spiteful. Surely I had nothing to fear now? Having wrung from him the reluctant admission that my work was correct, I might rest upon my laurels. I had underrated his capacity for evil-doing. When he glared at me over the upper frame of the big slate, the too-familiar heart-nausea got hold upon me. “_You_”—he seldom deigned to address me by my proper name—“pretend to tell me that nobody helped you with this sum?” “Nobody!” I uttered, made bold by innocence. “Ha-a-a-a!” malevolence triumphant in the drawl waxing into a snarl. “As I happened to see you and your sister last night in the hall, and heard you ask her to show you how to do it, that tale won’t go down, my lady.” “She didn’t help me—” I began, eagerly. “_Silence!_” thumping the slate upon the table, and scowling ferociously. “How dare you _lie_ to me?” I glanced at Mea in an agony. She arose in her place, pale to the lips, albeit she had never felt his wrath, but her voice was firm: “I only told her the sum was not right. I did not tell her what part of it was wrong.” The blending of snarl and smile was something to be recollected for all time. The smile was for her, the snarl for me.