The spring term opened with Clare in Miss Marsham's carved seat at morning prayers. The school had grown accustomed to its head-mistress's occasional absence. Miss Marsham, who had for some time felt the strain of school routine too much for her advanced years, was only able to sustain the fiction of her unimpaired powers by taking holidays, as a morphineuse takes her drug, in ever-increasing doses. She was confident in the discretion alike of Clare Hartill and Henrietta Vigers, and, indeed, but for their efficiency, the school would have suffered more quickly than it actually did. Nevertheless, the absence of supreme authority had, though but slightly, the usual disintegrating effect. There was always, naturally, an increase of friction between the two women, especially when the absence of the directress occurred at the beginning of a term. There would be the usual agitations--problems of housing and classification. There would arrive parents to be interviewed and impressed, new girls to be gracefully and graciously welcomed. Clare (to whom Henrietta, for all her hostility, invariably turned in emergencies), showing delicately yet unmistakably that she considered herself unwarrantably hampered in her own work, would submit to being on show with an air of bored acquiescence, tempered with modest surprise at the necessity for her presence. It was sufficiently irritating to Henrietta, under strict, if indirect, orders to leave the decorative side of the vice-regency to her rival. She was quite aware of Clare's greater effectiveness. She did not believe that it weighed with Miss Marsham against her own solid qualities. She affected to despise it. Yet despising, she envied. She was unjust to Clare, however, in believing the latter's reluctance entirely assumed. Clare enjoyed ruffling the susceptibilities of Henrietta, but she was none the less genuinely annoyed at being even partially withdrawn from her classes and was relieved when, at the end of a fortnight, Miss Marsham returned to her post. Clare had been forced to neglect her special work. Classes had been curtailed and interrupted, the many extra lessons postponed or turned over to Alwynne, whom more than any other mistress she had trained and could trust. It was Alwynne who, reporting to her at the end of the first fortnight, had made her more than ever eager to be rid of her deputyship. There were new girls in the Fifth in whom Alwynne was interested. One, at least, she prophesied, would be found to have stuff in her. It was a pity she was not in the Scholarship Class.... She was too good for the Lower Fifth.... Alwynne supposed it would be quite impossible to let her enter? "At this time of day? Impossible! Do you realise that we've only another three months?" "I don't suppose she'd want to, anyhow," said Alwynne. "She's a quaint person! Talk about independence! She informed me to-day that she shouldn't stay longer than half-term, unless she liked us."