Miss Primer at these words threw up her eyes to indicate the misery she had suffered before she had been able to bring herself to the point of reporting the twins. Phyllis whispered to Sylvia that Miss Primer looked like a dying duck in a thunder-storm, a phrase which she now heard for the first time and at which she laughed aloud.
Miss Ashley paused in her discourse and fixed Sylvia with her gray eyes in pained interrogation; Miss Pinck's chin shot out; Miss Lee bit her under lip and tenderly shook her head; the other girls stared at their laps and tried to look at one another without moving their heads. Phyllis quickly explained that it was she who had made Sylvia laugh.
"I'm awfully sorry, Miss Ashley," she drawled.
"I'm glad to hear that you are _very_ sorry," said Miss Ashley, "but Sylvia must realize when it is permissible and when it is not permissible to laugh. I'm afraid I must ask her to leave the room."
"I ought to go, too," Phyllis declared. "I made her laugh."
"I'm sure, Phyllis, that to yourself your wit seems irresistible. Pray let us have an opportunity of judging."
"Well, I said that Miss Primer looked like a dying duck in a thunder-storm."
The horrified amazement of everybody in the room expressed itself in a gasp that sounded like a ghostly, an infinitely attenuated scream of dismay. Sylvia, partly from nervousness, partly because the simile even on repetition appealed to her sense of the ridiculous, laughed aloud for a second time--laughed, indeed, with a kind of guffaw the sacrilegious echoes of which were stifled in an appalled silence.
"Sylvia Scarlett and Phyllis Markham will both leave the room immediately," said Miss Ashley. "I will speak to them later."
Outside the study of the head-mistress, Sylvia and Phyllis looked at each other like people who have jointly managed to break a mirror.
"Sylvia, I simply couldn't help it. I simply couldn't bear them all any longer."
"My dear, I know. Oh, I think it was wonderful of you."
Sylvia laughed heartily for the third time, and just at this moment the twins, who were the original cause of all the commotion, came sidling up to know what everybody had said.
"You little beasts with your bull's-eye lamps and your naughtiness," Phyllis cried. "I expect we shall all be expelled. What fun! I shall get some hunting. Oh, three cheers, I say!"