I shall write to Miss Virtue about 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.