Breakfast ended, as the girls were leaving the room for the tasks of the day, Miss Marlett beckoned Margaret aside. “Come to me, dear, in the boudoir, after Janey Harman,” said the schoolmistress in English, and in a tone to which Margaret was so unaccustomed that she felt painfully uneasy and anxious--unwonted moods for this careless maiden. “Janey, something must have happened,” she whispered to her friend, who was hardening her own heart for the dreadful interview. “Something’s _going_ to happen, I’m sure,” said poor Janey, apprehensively, and then she entered the august presence, alone. Margaret remained at the further end of the passage, leading to what Miss Marlett, when she spoke French, called her “boudoir.” The girl felt colder than even the weather warranted. She looked alternately at Miss Marietta door and out of the window, across the dead blank flats to the low white hills far away. Just under the window one of the little girls was standing, throwing crumbs, remains of the tartines, to robins and sparrows, which chattered and fought over the spoil. One or two blackbirds, with their yellow bills, fluttered shyly on the outside of the ring of more familiar birds. Up from the south a miserable blue-gray haze was drifting and shuddering, ominous of a thaw. From the eaves and the branches of the trees heavy drops kept falling, making round black holes in the snow, and mixing and melting here and there in a yellowish plash. Margaret shivered. Then she heard the boudoir door open, and Janey came out, making a plucky attempt not to cry. “What is it?” whispered Margaret, forgetting the dread interview before her, and her own unformed misgivings. “She won’t give me the letter. I’m to have it when I go home for good; and I’m to go home for good at the holidays,” whimpered Janey. “Poor Janey!” said Margaret, petting the blonde head on her shoulder. “Margaret Shields, come here!” cried Miss Marlett, in a shaky voice, from the boudoir. “Come to the back music-room when she’s done with you,” the other girl whispered. And Margaret marched, with a beating heart, into Miss Marlett’s chamber. “My dear Margaret!” said Miss Marlett, holding out her hands. She was standing up in the middle of the boudoir. She ought to have been sitting grimly, fortified behind her bureau; that was the position in which she generally received pupils on these gloomy occasions. “My dear Margaret!” she repeated. The girl trembled a little as the school-mistress drew her closer, and made her sit down on a sofa. “What has happened?” she asked. Her lips were so dry that she could scarcely speak. “You must make up your mind to be very brave. Your father----” “Was it an accident?” asked Margaret, suddenly. She knew pretty well what was coming. Often she had foreseen the end, which it needed no prophet to foretell. “Was it anything very dreadful?” “Mr. Maitland does not say. You are to be called for to-day. Poor Daisy!”