feature of the practice as the doctor himself.

It was to this rather old-fashioned household that Mavis and Merle, sworn to the most exemplary behaviour, were sent for three months in the hope that in the soft Devonshire air Mavis would catch no more bad bronchial colds, and would have a chance of setting up her health and growing the two extra inches which she still needed to set her head on the same level with Merle's.

To the two girls everything in Durracombe seemed delightful. The mildness of the climate amazed them. After the nip of Whinburn's perpetual east wind, lifeless hedgerows, and desolate winter fields, it felt like a sudden jump into spring to find campion, herb robert, and dead-nettle blooming by the road-sides, catkins waving on the hazel bushes, clumps of snowdrops and Christmas roses under the apple trees, violets beneath the sheltered wall, primroses peeping through last year's dead leaves, and the missel thrush chanting a triumphant song in the yew tree that overhung the river.

Mother, as happy as if she were a girl again, took them round to her favourite haunts: the beacon-top, where you could catch the first view of the sea, eight miles away; the moor with its rushes and soft, short green grass; the fields where cowslips would be found later on; the fir wood that seemed like a wilderness of Christmas trees; the marshy flats where you could see the wild ducks flying; the little quarry where the sand-martens had burrowed holes for their nests—all the dear delightful spots that she had known as a child, and had described to them so often that they recognized them the moment they saw them.

"It's gorgeous! Muvvie, if only you weren't going away I'd think myself in Paradise," declared Mavis, with pink cheeks, and standing on tiptoe as if she were growing already. "Uncle David's a dear, and so's Aunt Nellie, and as for Jessop, she's just a sport—that's what I call her. Bridge House is simply A1, and if school anything like comes up to it, well—I shall say it's the time of my life. It's going to be the nicest term I've ever had."

"Don't congratulate yourself too soon," croaked Merle. "School's school all the world over, and there's sure to be something to put up with. I'm not looking forward to sums and exercises. When do we start? To-morrow! Ugh! Enter it as a black day in the calendar of Merle Ramsay, and probably of the school too, for they won't find me soft wax in their hands. I've got ideas of my own, and when people begin to try to mould me I'm apt to turn katawampus. Mumsie, darling, don't shoot up your eyebrows! There! I'll promise and vow to be a perfect seraph. They'll call me St. Merle before they've done with me. Honest, Mumsie, I will really try! You know how I flare out, but I'll make a bouncing start at this new school and think of you every time I get into a pixie mood. If I don't, the Devonshire pixies had best steal me away and have done with it. I'd be a good riddance to everybody, I dare say."

Merle spoke half in jest and half in earnest. There was laughter in her voice, but her eyelashes were suddenly wet. Mrs. Ramsay laid a tender hand on her younger daughter's shoulder. She was not laughing at all.

"I hope both my girls are going to grow this term," she said quietly, "in character as well as in inches. There's room for improvement in both of you. Mavis must stir about instead of always dreaming and reading, and Merle must curb that little demon that sometimes gets possession of her. I expect to find two very sweet girls when I come to fetch them at Easter. We want this term to be in every sense a fortunate term."

"We'll do our level best, Muvvie! Can't you trust us?" whispered Mavis, linking her arm in her mother's, as they turned from the wood and began to walk down the hill-side towards the little town where the next eventful months of their lives were to be spent.

But Merle, who always hid her deepest feelings under a joke, chirruped out an impromptu ode to the future:

So it ended in the three of them laughing after all.

There was no large college or high school for girls in Durracombe, only a very small private establishment kept by Miss Mary Pollard and her sister Fanny, daughters of the late Rev. Horatio Pollard, formerly vicar of the parish. They educated about twenty-four children, half of them from the immediate neighbourhood: Opal Earnshaw, the bank-manager's daughter; Edith and Maude Carey, from the Vicarage; Christabel Oakley, who rode over on her bicycle from St. Gilda's Rectory; the three little Andrews, from Fir Tree House; Major Leach's small grand-children; Betty and Stella Marshall, who lived with their aunt, Miss Johnson, while their parents were in Buenos Ayres; and twelve resident boarders, most of whose parents were stationed in India, and who, born under burning skies, had been sent to Durracombe for the sake of its soft air and mild winter record, until they should be sufficiently acclimatized to stand their chance as hardy specimens in bigger schools.

"The Moorings" was a large, pleasant, white house with green shutters and a veranda, and it stood at the bottom of a short road that led from the High Street. It was what is commonly known as "a dear little school", that is to say it was rather old-fashioned and out-of-date but very comfortable and "homey", and the classes were more like lessons with a private governess than working with a form. Miss Pollard, whose hair was as silver as spun moonlight, had dropped behind the more modern methods of education, and, feeling rather diffident in the schoolroom, concentrated her attention on the housekeeping, cossetted up the delicate children, aired the linen, superintended the dormitories, and acted nurse to anybody who was lucky enough to be kept in bed. The bulk of the teaching rested in the hands of Miss Fanny, who was thorough, if old-fashioned, and whose original methods, by a curious coincidence, actually anticipated those of some of our most advanced educationists, and so placed her ahead of as well as behind the times.

It was into this small community, more like a big family than a school, that Mavis and Merle were introduced one January morning, causing visible thrills to the occupants of other desks as they took their seats. To plunge suddenly from the work of one school into that of another is a rather bewildering experience, and by the time the half-past twelve bell sounded, the Ramsay girls felt as if their standards had been turned upside down. Mavis, shaky in general over history, had reeled off the dates of the principal battles in the Civil War, the only period of which she happened to have any special knowledge, and Merle, by an equal fluke, worked correctly all her problems in mathematics, a lesson which she usually abhorred. They were so astonished at scoring on these subjects that they naturally hoped to do better still in the French class, for languages had been their one strong point at Whinburn High School. But alack for their self esteem! The girls at The Moorings had concentrated on French, and not only translated easily from a book which was much too stiff for the Ramsays, but chattered quite fluently with Mademoiselle Chavasse, whose encouraging remarks and questions were palpably not understood by her new pupils. It is humiliating not to be able to express yourself in a foreign tongue when others are talking it all round you. Merle, who