The lady principal of the school near Paddington had too high an opinion of her distinguished and influential friend, Mr. Wilton, to refuse a teacher who was so warmly recommended by him, more especially as her junior mistress had left her most inconveniently in the middle of term; so Katharine found herself installed there, about three weeks before the Easter holidays, with a class of thirty children in her sole charge. The teaching was only elementary, but there was plenty to be done; and she soon found that, although she was ostensibly only wanted in the mornings, she had to spend most of her afternoons also in correcting exercises. But the work interested her, and she had no difficulty in managing the children,--a fact which surprised her as much as it did Mrs. Downing, who had expected very little from her youthful looking teacher, in spite of her recommendation by Mr. Wilton. Mrs. Downing was a well-dressed little woman, with charming manners and an unbounded belief in herself. By resolutely playing on the weaknesses of others, she concealed her own shallowness of mind; and she made up for her lack of brains by contriving to have clever people always about her. She had chatted herself into a fashionable and paying connection in that part of Bayswater which calls itself Hyde Park; and if she employed tact and dissimulation in order to entrap the mothers of the neighbourhood, she was, to do her justice, genuine in her love of their children. Katharine would have found it difficult to like such a woman, had not a two months' sojourn with working gentlewomen taught her to tolerate weaknesses which would formerly have excited her contempt; and she endured her smiles and her blandishments with a stoicism that arose from a knowledge of their harmlessness. But Mrs. Downing remained in ignorance of the fact that her youngest teacher, with the serious face and the childish manner, was able to see right through her; and the impenetrability which saved her from feeling a snub, also spared her the knowledge that Katharine was laughing at her. One morning, about a week after she had begun her work as junior teacher, Katharine was interrupted in the middle of her first lesson by the precipitate entrance of the lady principal. "My dear Miss Austen," she began effusively, and then paused suddenly; for there was something about Katharine, in spite of her youthful look, which warned intruders that she was not to be interrupted so lightly as the other teachers. On this occasion she finished explaining to the children that saying Mary Howard was "_in_ the second piano" did not accurately express the fact that Mary Howard was practising in the second music-room; and then turned to see who had come in.