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break the force of the blows; but the child was so small and weak, and Vera Holmes so strong, and the fury in her face so uncontrolled, that Ann felt sickened. Biddy, still sobbing violently, rushed up the garden path towards the schoolroom; Jo followed more slowly, turning her head occasionally to watch, as though fascinated, her mother’s face. On the veranda there was silence. Then the telephone bell rang—three long rings—the signal for Tirau.

“I’ll go,” said Vera.

She was still trembling, and breathing heavily as though she had been running hard, but at the telephone her voice sounded normal once more.

“Yes? Oh… you! Wait a moment.”

She laid down the receiver and stepped back to the veranda.

“Just go up and see that the children are all right in the school-room, will you Miss Merrill?”

Ann needed no second bidding. She flew up the garden path. In one corner of the schoolroom Jo was bending over a heap of misery which was Biddy.

“You can have my red pencil, Bid,” she was saying. “The one with the injun-rubber at the end.”

“I don’t want it.”

She tried to force the red pencil between the fingers of two hands covering a convulsed and swollen face.

“I only chewed the injun-rubber a few times. It rubs out quite all right.”

Ann walked over to the prostrate child and gathered her up in her arms.

“Such a dusty old floor to lie on,” she remarked cheerfully.

Biddy struggled to be free.