"
Lavinia smiled triumphantly and tripped into the hackney coach that was
awaiting her.
CHAPTER III
"OH, MISTRESS MINE, WHERE ART THOU ROAMING?"
"Lavina! Have done!"
It was a whispered entreaty. The victim of the feather of a quill pen
tickling her neck dared not raise her voice. Miss Pinwell, the
proprietress of the extremely genteel seminary for young ladies, Queen
Square--quite an aristocratic retreat some two hundred years ago--was
pacing the school-room. Her cold, sharp eyes roamed over the shapely
heads--black, golden, brown, auburn, flaxen--of some thirty girls--eager
to detect any sign of levity and prompt to inflict summary punishment.
"Miss Fenton, why are you not working?" came the inquiry sharply from
Miss Pinwell's thin lips.
Lavinia Fenton withdrew the instrument of torture and Priscilla
Coupland's neck was left in peace. It was done so swiftly that Miss
Pinwell's glance, keen as it was, never detected the movement. But the
lady had her suspicions nevertheless, and she marched with the erectness
of a grenadier to where Lavinia Fenton sat with her eyes fixed upon her
copy book, apparently absorbed in inscribing over and over again the
moral maxim at the top of the page, and, it may be hoped, engrafting it
on her mind.
The young lady's industry did not deceive Miss Pinwell. Lavinia Fenton
was the black sheep--lamb perhaps is a more fitting word, she was but
seventeen--of the school.
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