have give me all that good advice free?"

Claire laughed. "She certainly was, and now you've just _got_ to go to
bed. I don't dare look at the clock, it's so late. Good-night, you
_good_ Martha! And thank you, from way deep down, for all you've done
for me."

But long after Mrs. Slawson had disappeared, the girl sat in the
solitude of her shadowy room thinking--thinking--thinking. Unable to get
away from her thoughts. There was something about this plan, to which
Martha had committed her, that frightened, overawed her. She felt a
strange impulse to resist it, to follow her own leading, and go to the
school instead. She knew her feeling was childish. Suppose Radcliffe
were to be unruly, why, how could she tell that the girls in the
Schoharie school might not prove even more so? The fact was, she argued,
she had unconsciously allowed herself to be prejudiced against Mrs.
Sherman and the boy, by Martha's whimsical accounts of them,
good-natured as they were. And this strange, premonitory instinct was
no premonitory instinct at all, it was just the natural reluctance of a
shy nature to face a new and uncongenial situation. And yet--and
yet--and yet, try as she would, she could not shake off the impression
that, beyond it all, there loomed something a hidden inner sense made
her hesitate to approach.

Just that moment, a dim, untraceable association of ideas drew her back
until she was face-to-face with a long-forgotten incident in her
very-little girlhood. Once upon a time, there had been a moment when she
had experienced much the same sort of feeling she had now--the feeling
of wanting to cry out and run away. As a matter of fact, she _had_ cried
out and run away. Why, and from what? As it came back to her, not from