Chapter 4 - Page 2

Margaret, holding up two very pretty dripping hands, and quoting, in mock heroic parody:

"Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,
Are not my hands washed white?"

"No talking in the bedrooms, young ladies," came a voice, accompanied by an icy draught, from the door, which was opened just enough to admit a fleeting vision of Miss Mariettas personal charms.

"I was only repeating my lay, Miss Marlett," replied the maiden thus rebuked, in a tone of injured innocence--

"'Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,'"

--and the door closed again on Miss Marlett, who had not altogether the best of it in this affair of outposts, and could not help feeling as if "that Miss Shields" was laughing at her.

"Old Cat!" the young lady went on, in a subdued whisper. "But no wonder my hands were a little black, Janey. You forget that it's my week to be Stoker. Already, girls, by an early and unexpected movement, I have cut off some of the enemy's supplies."

So speaking, Miss Margaret Shields proudly displayed a small deposit of coals, stored, for secrecy, in the bottom of a clothes-basket.

"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