"Miss Marshall is a fool. If you ask her a question outside the lesson she has to look it up in the book." "You are not here to criticize your teachers, you are here to account for your misbehaviour." "I am telling you why I misbehave. I can't listen to her. Nobody does. She sets us all wild. Everybody was half asleep so I bounced the lamp on the floor. She ought to have been grateful to me for getting their attention." "This is the second time this week that you have been reported for insubordination. This conduct cannot continue. I am writing your parents to-day that unless you mend your ways, they must take you away from here. You are contaminating the entire school." "They can't take me away too quickly." Miss Vantine thought best to ignore this impertinence. "You will take twenty demerits, and miss your walk in the park for a week. You may go now." The girl sauntered insolently out of the room, leaving Miss Vantine white with rage. She wrote a very firm letter to Mrs. Walter Bryce, who in turn wrote a denunciatory letter to her daughter, and there the matter rested. One disgrace followed another, and finally the school year dragged to a close. Isabelle went to The Beeches for the summer. There were four months of war to the knife with her mother, the usual number of scrapes, and a violent love affair with Herbert Hunter, home from St. George's. "What became of your reformed character?" inquired Wally one day. "I thought the Benjamins had made a human being of you." "They nearly did. But Max dragged me off and sent me to that fool Vantine, and I got over being human. What's the use?" The Bryces were glad when fall came and she was sent back to the school. As for Isabelle she did not much care where she went. There was a certain satisfaction--an _esprit de diablerie_--which amused her. Sharp of tongue and of wit, she knew she had a real gift for making herself a nuisance, and she took pride in it. Miss Vantine warned her at the beginning of the term that she was a marked character, and that unless she behaved herself she could not stay. She tempered her behaviour somewhat during the first term, but it was no use. Like every dog with a bad name, all the mischief in the school was attributed to her. According to schoolgirl canons of loyalty it was an unforgivable sin to tell tales or "give people away," so Isabelle shouldered the iniquity of the whole school. The teachers hated and feared her. Miss Vantine bore with her like a martyr--for two reasons. One was that she liked Mrs. Bryce, who had been her pupil; and the other was that she had never yet expelled a girl, and she disliked the idea intensely.