habit of horror at insubordination above every other crime. She felt
as disgraced as though Judith had been caught stealing,--perhaps more
so.

Miss Miller knocked at the door; the Principal, stooping and
hollow-chested, opened it and stood confronting with tired, kind eyes
the trio before him--the severe woman, with her pathetic, prematurely
old face and starved flat body, the pretty little girl hanging down
her head and weeping, the smaller child who gave him one black defiant
look and then gazed past him out of the window.

"Well, Miss Miller--?" he asked.

"I've brought you a case that I don't know what to do with," she
began. "This is Judith Marshall, in the third grade, and she has just
done one of the naughtiest things I ever heard of--"

When she had finished her recital, "How do you know this child did
it?" asked Mr. Bristol, always his first question in cases between
teachers and pupils.

"She was so brazen as to come right back and tell us so," said Miss
Miller, her tone growing more and more condemnatory.

Judith's face, capable of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut
down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked
at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm
crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls. "And
what has this little girl to do with anything?" he asked.