"I never could spell," answered Katrine serenely. "Then it's time you learnt. Your writing also is sprawling and careless, and you have no idea of punctuation. I wish you could have seen the neat, beautifully expressed essays that Ermengarde used to write. They were models of composition and tidiness." A suppressed smile passed round the form. The subject of Ermengarde was a perennial joke among the girls. Mrs. Franklin did not approve of holding up present pupils as patterns, for fear of fostering their vanity, so she generally quoted her daughter as an epitome of all the virtues. It was common knowledge in the school that Ermengarde's achievements had acquired an after-reputation which at the time they certainly did not justify. So far from being a shining ornament of Aireyholme, she had generally lagged in the wake of her form. She had bitterly disappointed her mother by barely scraping through her matriculation, and failing to win a scholarship for college. Poor Ermengarde had no gift for study; she was not particularly talented in any direction, and, shirking the various careers which Mrs. Franklin urged upon her, had taken fate into her own hands by marrying a curate, albeit he was impecunious, and "not at all clever, thank goodness!", as she confided to her intimate friends. When matrimony had debarred Ermengarde from any possibility of a college degree, her mother took it for granted that she would have obtained honours if she had only tried for them, and always spoke of her with regretful admiration as one who had laid aside the laurels of the muses for the duster of domesticity. "Saint Ermengarde", so the girls called her in mockery, lived therefore as a kind of school tradition, and she would have been very much surprised, indeed, had she known the extent to which her modest efforts had been magnified.