"Oh!" Miss Bey ejaculated, with peculiar meaning. "Then you will have a great deal to learn." "I suppose so," Beth rejoined. "But that's what I came for, you know--to learn. It's high time I began!" She fixed her big eyes on the blank wall opposite, and there was a sorrowful expression in them. Miss Bey noted the expression, and nodded her head several times, but there was no relaxation of her peremptory manner when she spoke again. "Go on, my dear," she said. "If I give as much time to the others as you are taking, I shall not get through the new girls to-night." Beth finished her dictation. "What a hand!" Miss Bey exclaimed. "Wherever did you learn to write like that?" "I taught myself to write small on purpose," Beth replied. "You can get so much more on to the paper." "You had better have taught yourself to spell, then," Miss Bey rejoined. "There are four mistakes in this one passage." Beth balanced her pencil on her finger with an air of indifference. She was wondering how it was that the head-mistress of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters used the word "wherever" as the vulgar do. The examination concluded with some questions in history and geography, which Beth answered more or less incorrectly. "I shall put you here in the sixth," Miss Bey informed her; "but rather for your size than for your acquirements. There is a delicate girl, much smaller than you are, in the first." "Then I'd rather be myself, tall and strong, in the sixth," Beth rejoined. "If I don't catch her up, at all events I shall have more pleasure in life, and that's something." Again Miss Bey gazed at her; but she was too much taken aback by Beth's readiness to correct her on the instant, although it was an unaccustomed and a monstrous thing for a girl to address a mistress in an easy conversational way, let alone differ from her. She took Beth to the great class-room where the seventh and eighth worked, and the fifth and sixth joined them for recreation and preparation, and where also the Bible lessons were given by Miss Clifford to the whole school. There were a good many girls of various ages in the room, who all looked up. "This is a new girl," Miss Bey said, addressing them generally,--"Miss Beth Caldwell. Please to show her where to go and what to do." She glanced round keenly as she spoke, then left the room; and at the same time a thin, sharp-looking little girl with short hair rose from the table at which she was sitting and went up to Beth. "I'm head of the fifth," she said. "Has Bey been examining you? What class did she put you in?" "The sixth," Beth said. "I should have thought you'd have been in the third at least," the head of the fifth piped, "you're so big. Here are some sixth girls--Jessie Baker, Ina Formby, Rosa Bird."