Clare was very lowly in her tone when she went into the school, with a bad headache and a pale face, and a spirit more subdued probably than it had ever been in her life before. It is very dreadful to make one’s self ridiculous, to show one’s self in a bad light, when one is young. The sense of shame is so intense, the certainty that nobody will ever forget it. She passed a great many false notes in the singing, and big stitches in the needlework, and was altogether so subdued and gentle that Miss Budd was filled with astonishment. “She must be going to be married,” sighed the schoolmistress, with a glow of sympathy and admiration in her eyes; for she was romantic, like so many young persons in her position, and full of interest, and a wistful, half-envying curiosity what that state of mind could be like. Miss Budd had seen a gentleman lingering about the school door; she had seen him pass and repass when she came back from the little parlour in which she had left Clare. She could not but volunteer one little timid observation, when Miss Arden’s duties were over, and she attended her to the door. “The gentleman went that way, Miss Clare,” said the schoolmistress, timidly stealing a glance from under her eyelashes. “What gentleman?” said Clare, with a start; and her self-control was not sufficient to keep the telltale blush from her cheeks. “Oh, my cousin, Mr. Arden,” she went on, coldly. “He has gone back to the Hall, I suppose.” And she pointedly went the other way when she left the school, taking a path which could only lead to Sally Timms’ cottage, a woman who was quite out of Clare’s good graces. “Can it be a quarrel?” Miss Budd asked herself anxiously, as she went back to her scholars. And Clare went hurriedly, seeing there was nothing else for it, to visit Sally Timms. Nothing could well be imagined more utterly unsatisfactory than Sally Timms’s house, and her children, and her personal character. She was the favourite pest of the village, though she did not originally belong to it, or even to the neighbourhood. Her boys thieved and played tricks, and took every malady incident to boys, and were generally known to have brought measles and whooping-cough, not to say small-pox, into Arden. The two former maladies had passed through all the children of the place, in consequence of the wandering propensities of Johnny and Tommy, and their faculty for catching everything that was going. And the latter had been only kept off by the prompt removal of Sally herself to the hospital in Liverpool, from whence she had come back white and swollen, and seamed and scarred, to the utter destruction of the remnant of good looks which she had once possessed. She was a widow, as such people always manage to be, and had no established means of livelihood. She took in washing when she could get it. She would go messages to Liverpool when her boys were doing something else, always ready for any piece of variety. She had