Winona’s hot face had been hidden under Audrey Redfern’s desk.  She rose reluctantly.  Her confusion made the hard passage seem twice as difficult.  Even the words which she had carefully looked up in the dictionary and learned by heart escaped her fickle memory.  She stumbled and floundered hopelessly, getting redder and redder with shame.  Miss Huntley preserved an ominous silence, and did not attempt to help her out.

“That will do!” she said, at the end of about eight lines.  “After such a complete exhibition of incompetence we won’t inflict any more of your bungling upon the form.  We must see if we can find a way of sharpening your wits.  Your brain seems to have been lying fallow since you came to school!  You will report yourself to Miss Bishop at four o’clock this afternoon.”

The rest of the morning passed like a bad dream to Winona.  It was a rare event for a teacher to send a girl to the head mistress.  The prospect of the coming interview made her cold with apprehension.  She avoided Garnet at one o’clock, and hurried out of the dressing-room without speaking to any one.  She had a wild project of pleading a headache, and begging Aunt Harriet to let her stop at home for the rest of the day.  But then to-morrow’s explanations would be infinitely worse.  No, it was better to face the horrible ordeal and get it over.  As it happened, Miss Beach had gone out to lunch, so that leave of absence was an impossibility.  Winona ate her early dinner alone.

“Aren’t you well, miss?  Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?” asked Alice the housemaid, noticing that the pudding was unappreciated, and divining that something must be amiss.

“No, thanks!  I’m in a hurry, and must fly off to school as quickly as I can.  It’s my early afternoon.”

Winona had a music lesson at a quarter past two on Thursdays.  It was always rather a rush to get back in time for it.  She crammed her “Bach’s Preludes” and “Schubert’s Impromptus” automatically into her portfolio, and started.  It was only when she was half-way down Church Street that she remembered she had left her book of studies on the top of the piano.  Needless to say, her lesson that day was hardly a success.  In the disturbed state of her mind she was quite incapable of concentrating her attention on music.  Miss Catteral looked surprised at her wrong notes and imperfect phrasing.

“I shall expect to find some improvement in this ‘Impromptu’ next week,” she remarked.  “Have you practiced your hour daily?  You must take these bars, which I have marked, separately, and play each twenty times in succession, slowly at first and then faster, and remember here that it is the left hand which gives the melody, and the right is only the accompaniment.  I thought you had sufficient music in you to appreciate that!  The way you thumped out those chords was painful.  I am not pleased at all.”