"She is treated with most unfair partiality," retorted Miss Russell in her thin and rather bitter voice. "I have not the smallest doubt, not the smallest, that she was guilty of putting those messes into my desk, of destroying my composition, and of caricaturing Mrs. Willis in Cecil Temple's book. I wonder after that Mrs. Willis did not see through her, but it is astonishing to what lengths favoritism will carry one. Mrs. Willis and Mr. Everard are behaving in a very unfair way to the rest of us in upholding this commonplace, disagreeable girl; but it will be to Mrs. Willis' own disadvantage. Hester, I am, as you know, leaving school at midsummer, and I shall certainly use all my influence to induce my father and mother not to send the younger girls here; they could not associate with a person like Miss Forest."