you; there must be something very wrong in her management of you,
or you would never be so passionate and insolent as you are."

But Isobel had not stopped to hear the last part of the sentence,
the door had slammed behind her. She was not many minutes alone
upstairs, for Robert soon followed her up, for when she was at home
he rarely left her side, watching her every look and gesture with
eyes as loving as those of a dog, and happy to sit on the ground
beside her, with his head leaning against her, for hours together.

Mrs. Hannay kept her word and wrote to Miss Virtue, and the evening
after she returned to school Isobel was summoned to her room.

"I am sorry to say, I have a very bad account of you from your
mother. She says you are a passionate and wicked girl. How is it,
dear; you are not passionate here, and I certainly do not think
you are wicked?"

"I can't help it when I am at home, Miss Virtue. I am sure I try to
be good, but they won't let me. They don't like me because I can't
be always tidy and what they call prettily behaved, and because I
hate walking on the parade and being stuck up and unnatural, and
they don't like me because I am not pretty, and because I am thin
and don't look, as mamma says, a credit to her; but it is not that
so much as because of Robert. You know he is deformed, Miss Virtue,
and they don't care for him, and he has no one to love him but me,
and it makes me mad to see him treated so. That is what it was she
wrote about. I told her they treated him like a dog and so they
do," and she burst into tears.