Be it said to Miss Green’s credit that she was an excellent teacher. The colleges which the St. Helen’s girls entered, expected and received girls whose training in Latin and Greek was unexcelled. She had been ten years at St. Helen’s. Perhaps her superior teaching and her unshaken faithfulness to duty, more than offset her failure, which she herself did not perceive, as a disciplinarian. However that might be, the girls at St. Helen’s did not love Miss Green. Virginia, being a new-comer, resolved to like her; and to that end she really strove, being the one girl in The Hermitage and often the only one in school, who defended the teacher, whose strict adherence to her own interpretation of duty brought with it sad mishaps, often for the girls and sometimes for herself. Even Mary, who was Miss Green’s helper, though she did not say much at the indignation meetings of the other girls, quite clearly did not like Miss Green. “I think it’s sweet of you, Virginia, to stand up for her,” Priscilla announced one evening, as they wrestled with extra hard Latin lessons, “but your time hasn’t come yet. I hope you’ll always be able to like Greenie, but I have my doubts.” “Well, I’m going to try hard, anyway. Of course, I shan’t love her—I don’t hope for that—but she seems so left out with us all loving Miss Wallace so much, that I’m going to try.” “That’s just what I thought when I came last year,” observed the experienced Priscilla. “But after she just the same as accused me of borrowing the down-stairs ink-bottle and never returning it, I couldn’t like her any longer.” Whether Miss Green liked the gray-eyed Western girl, who was trying so hard in the face of so many odds to like her was not as yet known. Perhaps she was slowly deciding whether or not Virginia might be trusted; and very soon events were to come to pass requiring that decision to be made.