"What on earth's the matter?" asked her neighbour crossly; it was the black-haired boarder who had winked at Laura the first evening at tea; her name was Bertha Ramsey. "I can't draw a stroke if you shake like that." "I've lost my pencil." The girl considered Laura for a moment, then pushed the lid from a box of long, beautifully sharpened drawing-pencils. "Here, you can have one of these." Laura eyed the well-filled box admiringly, and modestly selected the shortest pencil. Bertha Ramsay, having finished her map, leaned back in her seat. "And next time you feel inclined to boo-hoo at the tea-table, hold on to your eyebrows and sing Rule Britannia.--DID it want its mummy, poor ickle sing?" Here Bertha's chum, a girl called Inez, chimed in from the other side. "It's all very well for you," she said to Bertha, in a deep, slow voice. "You're a weekly boarder." Laura had the wish to be very pleasant, in return for the pencil. So she drew a sigh, and said, with over-emphasis: "How nice for your mother to have you home every week!" Bertha only laughed at this, in a teasing way: "Yes, isn't it?" But Inez leaned across behind her and gave Laura a poke. "Shut up!" she telegraphed. "Who's talking down there?" came the governess's cry. "Here you, the new girl, Laura what's--your-name, come up to the map." A huge map of England had been slung over an easel; Laura was required to take the pointer and show where Stafford lay. With the long stick in her hand, she stood stupid and confused. In this exigency, it did not help her that she knew, from hear-say, just how England looked; that she could see, in fancy, its ever-green grass, thick hedges, and spreading trees; its never-dry rivers; its hoary old cathedrals; its fogs, and sea-mists, and over-populous cities. She stood face to face with the most puzzling map in the world--a map seared and scored with boundary-lines, black and bristling with names. She could not have laid her finger on London at this moment, and as for Stafford, it might have been in the moon. While the class straggled along the verandah at the end of the hour, Inez came up to Laura's side. "I say, you shouldn't have said that about her mother." She nodded mysteriously. "Why not?" asked Laura, and coloured at the thought that she had again, without knowing it, been guilty of a FAUX PAS. Inez looked round to see that Bertha was not within hearing, then put her lips to Laura's ear. "She drinks." Laura gaped incredulous at the girl, her young eyes full of horror. From actual experience, she hardly knew what drunkenness meant; she had hitherto associated it only with the lowest class of Irish agricultural labourer, or with those dreadful white women who lived, by choice, in Chinese Camps. That there could exist a mother who drank was unthinkable ... outside the bounds of nature.