“Gracious, Daisy, how clever! Well, you are something _like_ a stoker,” exclaimed the third girl, who by this time had finished dressing: “we shall have a blaze to-night.” Now, it must be said that at Miss Marlett’s school, by an unusual and inconsistent concession to comfort and sanitary principles, the elder girls were allowed to have fires in their bed-rooms at night, in winter. But seeing that these fires resembled the laughter of the wicked, inasmuch as they were brief-lived as the crackling of thorns under pots, the girls were driven to make predatory attacks on fuel wherever it could be found. Sometimes, one is sorry to say, they robbed each other’s fireplaces, and concealed the coal in their pockets. But this conduct--resembling what is fabled of the natives of the Scilly Islands, that they “eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in each other’s washing”--led to strife and bickering; so that the Stoker for the week (as the girl appointed to collect these supplies was called) had to infringe a little on the secret household stores of Miss Marlett. This week, as it happened, Margaret Shields was the Stoker, and she so bore herself in her high office as to extort the admiration of the very housemaids. “Even the ranks of Tusculum Could scarce forbear to cheer,” If we may again quote the author who was at that time Miss Shields’ favorite poet. Miss Shields had not studied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and was mercifully unaware that not to detect the “pinchbeck” in the _Lays_ is the sign of a grovelling nature. Before she was sent to Miss Marlett’s, four years ere this date, Margaret Shields’ instruction had been limited. “The best thing that could be said for it,” as the old sporting prophet remarked of his own education, “was that it had been mainly eleemosynary.” The Chelsea School Board fees could but rarely be extracted from old Dicky Shields. But Robert Maitland, when still young in philanthropy, had seen the clever, merry, brown-eyed child at some school treat, or inspection, or other function; had covenanted in some sort with her shiftless parent; had rescued the child from the streets, and sent her as a pupil to Miss Marlett’s. Like Mr. Day, the accomplished author of “Sandford and Merton,” and creator of the immortal Mr. Barlow, Robert Maitland had conceived the hope that he might have a girl educated up to his own intellectual standard, and made, or “ready-made,” a helpmate meet for him. He was, in a more or less formal way, the guardian of Margaret Shields, and the ward might be expected (by anyone who did not know human nature any better) to blossom into the wife. Maitland could “please himself,” as people say; that is, in his choice of a partner he had no relations to please--no one but the elect young lady, who, after all, might not be “pleased” with alacrity.