The next day she began her school experience. The intervening day had been used by Mrs. Busby to make a call upon Mrs. Mowbray, in which she explained that she had an orphan niece left under her care, for whom she much desired the training and the discipline of Mrs. Mowbray's excellent school. The girl had had no advantages; her mother had been ill and the child neglected; she supposed Mrs. Mowbray would find that she knew next to nothing of all that she ought to know. So it was arranged that Rotha should accompany her cousin the very next morning, and make her beginning in one of the younger classes. Rotha went in her old grey dress. The walk was not long. Antoinette stopped at the area gate of a house in a fine open street. "Where are you going?" said Rotha. "Here. This is the place." "This? Why it is a very handsome house," said Rotha. "As good as yours." "Of course it is handsome," Antoinette replied. "Do you think my mother would let me go to a shabby place. Handsome! of course it is. Come down this way; we don't ring the bell." What a new world it was to Rotha! In the lower hall the girls took off bonnets and wraps, hanging them up on hooks arranged there. Then Antoinette took her up stairs, up a second flight of stairs, through halls and stairways which renewed Rotha's astonishment. Was this a school? All the arrangements seemed like those of an elegant private home; soft carpet was on the stairs, beautiful engravings hung on the walls. The school rooms filled the second floor; they were already crowded, it seemed to Rotha, with rows and ranks of scholars of all sizes, from ten years old up. Antoinette and she, being later than the rest, slipped into the first seats they could find, near the door. There was deep silence and great order, and then Rotha heard a voice in the next room beginning to read a chapter in the Bible. The sound of the voice struck her and made her wish to get a sight of the reader; but that was impossible, for a bit of partition wall hid her and indeed most of the room in which she was from Rotha's view. So Rotha's attention concentrated itself upon what she could see. The pleasant, bright apartments; the desks before which sat so many well-dressed and well- looking girls; ah, they were very well dressed, and many of them, to her fancy, very richly dressed; as for the faces, she found there was the usual diversity. But what would anybody think of a girl coming among them so very shabby and meanly attired as she was? If she had known-- However, self-consciousness was not one of Rotha's troubles, and soon in her admiration of the maps and pictures on the walls she almost forgot her own poor little person. She was aware that after the reading came a prayer; but though she knelt as others knelt, I am bound to say very little of the sense of the words found its way to her mind.