To Kitty it looked the very acme of correct, neat, yet hateful propriety, and her thoughts flew back longingly to the dear old irregular wind-swept street of Gorlay, which was to her then the most lovable and lovely spot on the face of the earth.

At last, when she was almost tired of speculating on the people who lived in the houses they were passing, and of pitying them for being condemned to such a fate, the jolting cab drew up before a corner house, one of the primmest of all the houses in the dullest of all the roads they had passed that afternoon, and Kitty saw a shining brass plate on the rails at the foot of the tiny patch of trim garden, and on the brass plate "Miss Pidsley." That was all.

And this was the place that was to be her home! It was quite a small school to which she had been banished--a small private one where a few girls "who needed particular attention and training received the individual care they needed," as Aunt Pike carefully read out from the prospectus, dealing poor Kitty thus the last and most crushing insult.
If the outside of the house had been unlike home and Gorlay, the inside was even more so; the extreme neatness, the absolute spotlessness of everything, the bareness, the high, square, ugly rooms, each and all weighed on Kitty's spirits with a fresh load of depression.

At the thought of being left there for months together with not a face about her that she knew, or a person who cared for her, she felt positively sick with misery.

She even dreaded the moment when Aunt Pike should depart.