One day just before the end of the summer term, Miss Perne asked Miriam to preside over the large schoolroom for the morning. The first and second-class girls were settled there at their written examination in English history. Rounding the schoolroom door she stood for a moment in the doorway. The sunlight poured in through the wide bay window and the roomful of quiet girls seemed like a field. Jessie Wheeler’s voice broke the silence. “It’s the Hen,” she shouted gently. “It’s the blessed Hen! Oh, _come_ on. You going to sit with us?” “Yes. Be quiet,” said Miriam. “Oh, thank goodness,” groaned Jessie, supported by groans and murmurs from all over the room. “Be quiet, girls, and get on with your papers,” said Miriam in a tone of acid detachment from the top of her tide. She sat feeling that her arms were round the entire roomful, that each girl struggling alone with the list of questions was resting against her breast. “I’m going away from them. I must be going away from them,” ran her thoughts regretfully. “They can’t keep me. This is the utmost. I’ve won. There’ll never be anything more than this, here.” It would always be the same--with different girls. Certainty. Even the sunlight paid a sort of homage to the fathomless certainty she felt. The sunlight in this little schoolroom was telling her of other sunlights, vast and unbroken, somewhere--coming, her own sunlights, when she should have wrenched herself away. It was there; she glanced up again and again to watch it breaking and splashing all over the room. It would come again, but how differently. Quite soon. She might have spared herself all her agonising. The girls did not know where she belonged. They were holding her. But she would go away, to some huge open space. Leave them--ah, it was unkind. But she had left them already in spirit. If they could all get up together now and sing, let their voices peal together up and up, throw all the books out of the window, they might go on together, forward into the sunshine, but they would not want to do that. Hardly any of them would want to do that. They would look at her with knowing eyes, and look at the door, and stay where they were.