which he could not read, with the same toothless smile and showers of blessings. If, as Miss Gibbs suggested, his cottage would have been improved by a little more soap and water, and a good stiff broom, that did not really matter, as he was generally sitting outside on a bench beside a beehive, with a black-and-white Manx cat upon his knee, and a tame jackdaw hanging in a wicker cage by the window, exactly like a coloured frontispiece in a Christmas number of a magazine. It was a tremendous blow to the school when the news was circulated that old Wilkinson had received notice to quit his cottage. The girls were filled with indignation against his landlord. The fact that that long-suffering farmer had received no rent for the last six months, and badly required the cottage as a billet for lady workers on the land, went for nothing in the estimation of the Grange inmates. Wilkinson, so they considered, was a persecuted old man, about to be evicted from his home, and a very proper object for sympathy and consideration. "Something's got to be done for him--that's flat!" declared Raymonde. "You don't suppose we can allow him to be taken to the workhouse? It's unthinkable! He'd break his poor old heart. And we'd miss him so, too. Won't the landlord change his mind and let him stay?" "Miss Gibbs went to see him about it," vouchsafed Aveline agitatedly, "and she came back and shook her head, and said she couldn't but feel that the man was only doing his duty, and women were wanted on the land, and must have a place to live in, and someone had to be sacrificed." "He's a victim of the war!" sighed Morvyth. "One of those outside victims who don't get Victoria Crosses and military funerals." "He hasn't come to a funeral yet!" bristled Raymonde. "The old boy looks good for another ten years or so. Don't you go ordering tombstones and wreaths!" "I wasn't going to. How you snap me up! All the same, I heard Miss Beasley tell Miss Gibbs that if he has to go to the workhouse it will be enough to kill him." "Then we've absolutely got to keep him alive! Won't anybody in the village take him in?" "No, they're all full up, and say they can't do with him, and he hasn't any relations of his own except a drunken granddaughter in a town slum." Raymonde sighed dramatically. "I'm going to think, and think, and think, and think, until I find some way of helping him," she announced. "It'll be hard work, because I hate thinking, but I'll do it, you'll see!" Raymonde was abstracted that evening, both at preparation and at supper. In the dormitory she put aside all conversation with a firm: "Don't talk to me, I'm thinking!" She borrowed Fauvette's bottle of eau-de-Cologne, and went to bed with a bandage tied round her head to assist her cogitations. "Of course I shan't go to sleep," she assured the others. "I must just lie awake until the idea comes to me. Old Wilkinson's on my mind."