One night they had put her quietly to bed as usual,
and in the morning she was still asleep--a slumber which really must
be rest.
Fortunately for Mrs. Bishop the school was planted then. Twenty
pupils sat round the cheap kitchen tables in the schoolroom--all sons
of gentlemen--whose mothers paid occasional visits to the house and
peeped into the schoolroom, after they had partaken of tea with Mrs.
Bishop in the drawing-room. Whenever this incident occurred, the
little boys rose electrically from their forms in courteous
deference to the visitor; and the boy, whose mother it was, would
blush with pride and look away, or he would frankly smile up to his
mother's eyes. Then Mrs. Bishop would inevitably eulogize his
progress as she sped the parting guest, making inquiries from her
daughters afterwards to ascertain how near she had gone to the truth.
One boarder only she accepted into the establishment. It had not been
her intention to have any. But one day a lady had written from
Winchester to say that through a friend of a friend of Lady Bray's,
she had heard of Mrs. Bishop's preparatory school for the sons of
gentlemen. She was compelled, she concluded in her letter, to go for
some little time to live in London and, though she knew that Mrs.
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