Probably Mrs. Fortescue-Filley had calculated on keeping up her pretty career of imposture until her time of probation at the Home was up, and she could withdraw her entrance fee and vanish at once from ’Quawket and Tophill. She had the report business well in hand; her employer occasionally wrote her for detailed information on minor points of the child’s work or personal needs, but in general expressed himself perfectly satisfied; and she felt quite safe, so far as he was concerned, when he commissioned her to put the child through an all-round examination, and sent her fifty dollars extra with his “highest compliments” on her manner of doing it. Indeed, in this she was no humbug. She could have put the principal, himself, through his scholastic facings if she had cared to. But the appearance of those unholy portraits came without warning, and did their work thoroughly. Even if it had not been that every child in the institute could recognize that well-known countenance, a still more damning disclosure came in the prompt denunciation of the fraud by the “Indignant Theatre Goer” with a long memory, who wrote to the local paper to protest against the profanation, as he put it, of the features of a peerless Mrs. Fortescue, once an ornament of the stage, and now dwelling in retirement in ’Quawket. Ordinary, common, plain, every-day gossip did the rest. [Illustration] Mrs. Fortescue saw the posters on her way to Tophill, but she dauntlessly presented herself at the portal. She got no further. The principal interposed himself between her and his shades of innocents, and he addressed that creature of false pretenses in scathing language--or it might have scathed if the good man had not been so angry that he talked falsetto. It did not look as if there were much in the situation for Mrs. Fortescue, but it would be a strange situation out of which the lady could not extract just the least little bit of acting. She drew herself up in majestic indignation, hurled the calumnies back at the astonished principal, and with a magnificent threat to bring Mr. Filley right to the spot to utterly overwhelm and confute him, she swept away, leaving the Institute looking two sizes smaller, and its principal looking no particular size at all. * * * * * And, what is more, she did, for her magnificent dramatic outburst made her fairly acting-drunk. She could not help herself; she was inebriated with the exuberance of her own verbosity, to use a once famous phrase, and she simply had to go off on a regular histrionic bat.