Miss Strickland mentally provided for this young criminal a castigation of the direst kind, short of direct profanity. Only men (who deserve it) may have the relief of an entire language to devote to wrath. Miss Strickland had to rely upon the fervency of her emotion. Then she listened, with the grim patience of a teacher who is not involved in the subject, to a bad recitation. After this there were several excellent and charming songs with choruses. Miss Strickland had taught them to the school, and in one case written the song herself. They went with a vim, and gave her a certain amount of very slight pleasure. And then Elsie appeared. She was dressed in a heavy white muslin dress which revealed her thick ankles and pitilessly broad-toed shoes. It was the wrong kind of muslin, trimmed with tawdry embroidery and girt about the untamed breadth of her waist by a harsh blue sash. Her hair lay lankly down her back, evading where it could the ministrations of a similarly harsh blue ribbon. Elsie moved heavily and stared at the audience with the eyes of a sleep walker. Miss Strickland had particularly told Elsie to keep her mouth shut, her head up and her chin in. The results of these attempts upon the figure are usually beneficial to young performers, but nothing could do much for Elsie’s figure; it remained thick and uncertain, with a tendency to bulge in the wrong places. Miss Strickland felt an unusual pang of depression when she saw Elsie, followed by a much more usual one of rage. Why had not Elsie’s mother chosen more suitable clothes for her? “Women again! They only think of clothes, and they show the value of their thought by a stupid result like this!” thought Miss Strickland sternly. Elsie sat down clumsily on the music stool. It was lower than she had expected it to be. Miss Saunders, the young music teacher, adjusted the Mendelssohn. It was “The Venetian Boat Song,” the easiest and lightest of concert pieces. Elsie played the first two bars quite faultlessly. Miss Strickland was about to breathe a sigh of relief, when, to her horror, the girl stopped abruptly and took her hands off the piano. Then she played the first two bars over again, and stopped once more. There was a long silence in the hall, a breathless, inconvenient silence, and then Elsie turned slowly on her music stool away from the piano and faced the audience. She looked like some one delivering themselves into the hands of Red Indians for torture. She faced them with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed, not so much appealingly as hopelessly, upon the audience. She did not cry; it was the expression of an immovable despair. She neither stirred nor spoke, she only looked straight in front of her as if she saw the end of Hope. Miss Strickland felt as if the child’s gaze fixed itself upon her heart. Before she had time to move, Miss Saunders had stepped forward at a sign from Miss Bretherton, and led Elsie away.