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Updated: May 3, 2025
"Poor Janey!" said Margaret, petting the blonde head on her shoulder. "Margaret Shields, come here!" cried Miss Marlett, in a shaky voice, from the boudoir. "Come to the back music-room when she's done with you," the other girl whispered. And Margaret marched, with a beating heart, into Miss Marlett's chamber. "My dear Margaret!" said Miss Marlett, holding out her hands.
The Chelsea School Board fees could but rarely be extracted from old Dicky Shields. But Robert Maitland, when still young in philanthropy, had seen the clever, merry, brown-eyed child at some school treat, or inspection, or other function; had covenanted in some sort with her shiftless parent; had rescued the child from the streets, and sent her as a pupil to Miss Marlett's. Like Mr.
She had learned much, working harder than they knew; she had been in the "best set" among the pupils, by dint of her cheery rebelliousness. Now she suddenly felt all her loneliness, and knew, too, that she had been living, socially, in that little society at the expense of this kind queer old Miss Marlett's feelings. "I have been horrid to you," she repeated. "I wish I had never been born."
Matthew Arnold, and was mercifully unaware that not to detect the "pinchbeck" in the Lays is the sign of a grovelling nature. Before she was sent to Miss Marlett's, four years ere this date, Margaret Shields' instruction had been limited. "The best thing that could be said for it," as the old sporting prophet remarked of his own education, "was that it had been mainly eleemosynary."
Whether this regimen was enough to support growing girls, who had risen at seven, till dinnertime at half-past one, is a problem which, perhaps, the inexperienced intellect of man can scarcely approach with confidence. Not that Miss Marlett's establishment was a Dothegirls Hall, nor a school much more scantily equipped with luxuries than others.
The red-brick house, with its lawn sloping down to the fields, all level with snow, stood at a little distance from the main road, at the end of a handsome avenue of Scotch pines. But the fires at Miss Marlett's were not good on this February morning. They never were good at the Dovecot.
Arithmetic and algebra were not this scholar's forte; and no young lady in Miss Marlett's establishment was so hungry, or so glad when eight o'clock struck and the bell rang for breakfast, as Margaret Shields. Breakfast at Miss Marlett's was not a convivial meal.
Well, you are something like a stoker," exclaimed the third girl, who by this time had finished dressing: "we shall have a blaze to-night." Now, it must be said that at Miss Marlett's school, by an unusual and inconsistent concession to comfort and saniitary principles, the elder girls were allowed to have fires in their bed-rooms at night, in winter.
"The seafaring man with whom Shields was drinking on the last night of his life, and the gentleman in the fur travelling-coat who sent the telegram in your name and took away Margaret from Miss Marlett's, are in the same employment, or, by George, are probably the same person. Now, have you any kind of suspicion who they or he may be? or can you suggest any way of tracking him or them?"
Whether pleased or not, there could be no doubt that Margaret Shields was extremely pleasing. Beside her two shivering chamber-mates ("chamber-dekyns" they would have been called, in Oxford slang, four hundred years ago), Miss Shields looked quite brilliant, warm, and comfortable, even in the eager and the nipping air of Miss Marlett's shuddering establishment, and by the frosty light of a single candle. This young lady was tall and firmly fashioned; a nut-brown maid, with a ruddy glow on her cheeks, with glossy hair rolled up in a big tight knot, and with
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