I found the work in my new class taxed my exertions to the uttermost. Mrs. Marshall had a very high standard as to what should be required from girls of our age, and it was only with the greatest difficulty I was able to keep up to it. Without Cathy's help I must most certainly have failed. She was a true friend in need. She would patiently go over my preparation with me, explaining difficult rules, repeating dates and vocabularies again and again to fix them in my memory, or showing me so clearly and concisely the reasons for the various problems in mathematics, that I felt I could learn more easily from her than from our teachers. My one haunting fear was that Mrs. Marshall should consider me below the level of the class and should send me down again into the fourth, for to be thus banished from Cathy seemed the worst that fate could hold in store for me. Never very robust I worked far beyond my strength, and the continual strain began at last to tell upon my health. I grew thin and pale, I was troubled with a perpetual headache, and I sometimes indulged in unreasonable fits of crying, which incurred the severe reproof of Miss Percy, who had no sympathy with "nerves". "I can't help it--I can't, indeed!" I confided to Cathy after one of these outbreaks. "My head feels so chock full of facts I sometimes think it won't hold any more. When I look at my book the letters seem to dance before my eyes, and I mix up mathematics with history and want to talk German in the French class." "Tell Mrs. Marshall, and ask her to knock something off," suggested Cathy. "No, no! She would only say the class was too difficult for me, and send me down, and unless I can stay up here with you and Janet life simply isn't worth living. Never mind, I'll manage to worry on somehow, if only Miss Percy would let me alone!" Unfortunately that was exactly what Miss Percy would not do. She had taken it into her head that I was hysterical, and that my whims and fancies must not on any account be humoured. I dare say she thought she was only doing her duty, but she harried me continually. An untied hair-ribbon, a blot on my exercise, an ink-stain on my finger, or an awkward attitude in class, were occasions for instant and severe fault-finding. No doubt they were all little defects which called for amendment, but she made the mistake of dealing with them too hardly. I believe, if people would only realize it, that overwork and ill-health are often responsible for many tiresome habits in growing girls. It was certainly so in my case; I sat crooked because my back ached, I lolled on my desk because I was really tired, I fidgeted from sheer nervousness when I felt Miss Percy's eye upon me, and when, having brought down all the vials of her wrath upon my head, I ended by bursting into tears, it was hard to be accused of temper or sullenness when I felt I would have given the whole world for a kind word.