Her growing conviction and the distress of it were confirmed each week by a spectacle she could not escape and was rapidly growing to hate. Just in front of her and considerably behind the flying van, her full wincey skirt billowing out beneath what seemed to Miriam a dreadfully thin little close-fitting stockinette jacket, trotted Mademoiselle--one hand to the plain brim of her large French hat, and obviously conversational with either Minna and Elsa or Clara and Emma on either side of her. Generally it was Minna and Elsa, Minna brisk and trim and decorous as to her neat plaid skirt, however hurried, and Elsa showing her distress by the frequent twisting of one or other of her ankles which looked, to Miriam, like sticks above her high-heeled shoes. Mademoiselle's broad hat-brim flapped as her head turned from one companion to the other. Sometimes Miriam caught the mocking tinkle of her laughter. That all three were interested, too, Miriam gathered from the fact that they could not always be relied upon to follow Gertrude. The little party had returned one day in two separate groups, fortunately meeting before the Waldstrasse gate was reached, owing to Mademoiselle's failure to keep Gertrude in sight. There was no doubt, too, that the medium of their intercourse was French, for Mademoiselle's knowledge of German had not, for all her six months at the school, got beyond a few simple and badly managed words and phrases. Miriam felt that this French girl was perfectly carrying out Fräulein Pfaff's design. She talked to her pupils, made them talk; the girls were amused and happy and were picking up French. It was admirable and it was wonderful to Miriam because she felt quite sure that Mademoiselle had no clear idea in her own mind that she was carrying out any design at all. That irritated Miriam. Mademoiselle liked talking to her girls. Miriam was beginning to know that she did not want to talk to her girls. Almost from the first she had begun to know it. She felt sure that if Fräulein Pfaff had been invisibly present at any one of her solitary conversational encounters with these German girls she would have been judged and condemned. Elsa Speier had been the worst. Miriam could see as she thought of her, the angle of the high garden wall of a corner house in Waldstrasse and above it a blossoming almond tree. "How lovely that tree is," she had said. She remembered trying hard to talk and to make her talk and making no impression upon the girl. She remembered monosyllables and the pallid averted face and Elsa's dreadful ankles. She had walked along intent and indifferent and presently she had felt a sort of irritation rise through her struggling. And then further on in the walk, she could not remember how it had arisen, there was a moment when Elsa had said with unmoved, averted face hurriedly, "My fazzer is offitser"--and it seemed to Miriam as if this were the answer to everything she had tried to say, to her remark about the almond-tree and