Book I

I

The Game of Consequences

The firelight flickered on the nursery wall, and the children sat round

the table, learning the new game which the nursery-maid said they would

like ever so, directly they understood it.

"I understand it already," said Alex, the eldest, tossing her head

proudly. "Look, Barbara, you fold the piece of paper like this, and then

give it to Cedric, because he's next to you, and I give mine to you, and

Emily gives hers to me. That's right, isn't it, Emily?"

"Quite right, Miss Alex; what a clever girl, to be sure. Here, Master

Baby, you can play with me. You're too little to do it all by yourself."

"He isn't Baby any more. We've got to call him Archie now. The new

little sister is Baby," said Alex dictatorially.

She liked always to be the one to give information, and Emily had only

been with them a little while. The children's own nurse would have told

her to mind her own business, or to wait till she was asked, before

teaching her grandmother, but Emily said complacently:

"To be sure, Miss Alex! and such a big boy as Master Archie is, too. Now

you all write down a name of a gentleman."

"What gentleman?" asked Cedric judicially. He was a little boy of eight,

with serious grey eyes and a good deal of dignity.

"Why, any gentleman. Some one you all know."

"I know, I know."

Alex, always the most easily excited of them all, scribbled on her piece

of paper and began to bounce up and down on her chair.

"Hurry up, Barbara. You're so slow."

"I don't know who to put."

Alex began to whisper, and Barbara at once said:

"Nurse doesn't allow us to whisper. It's bad manners."

"You horrid little prig!"

Alex was furious. Barbara's priggishness always put her into a temper,

because she felt it, unconsciously, to be a reflection on her own

infallibility as the eldest.

"Miss Barbara," said Emily angrily, "it's not for you to say what Nurse

allows or doesn't allow; _I'm_ looking after you now. The idea, indeed!"

Barbara's pale, pointed little face grew very red, but she did not cry,

as Alex, in spite of her twelve years, would almost certainly have cried

at such a snub.

She set her mouth vindictively and shot a very angry look at Alex out of

her blue eyes. Then she wrote something on the slip of paper, shielding

it with her hand so that her sister could not read it.

Cedric was printing in large capitals, easily legible, but no one was

interested in what Cedric wrote.

There was a good deal of whispering between Emily and little Archie, and

then the papers were folded up once more and passed round the table

again.

"But when do we see what we've written?" asked Alex impatiently.

"Not till the end of the game, then we read them out. That's where the

fun comes in," said Emily.

It was a long while before the papers were done, and most of the

children found it very difficult to decide what _he_ said to _her_, what

she replied, and what the world said. But at last even Barbara, always

lag-last, folded her slip, very grimy and thumb-marked, and put it with

the others into Emily's apron.

"Now then," giggled the nursery-maid, "pull one out, Master Archie, and

I'll see what it says."

Archie snatched at a paper, and they opened it.

"Listen!" said Emily.

"The Queen met Master Archie--whoever of you put the Queen?"

"Cedric!" cried the other children.

Cedric's loyalty to his Sovereign was a by-word in the nursery.

"Well, the Queen met Master Archie in the Park. She said to him, 'No,'

and he answered her, 'You dirty little boy, go 'ome and wash your face.'

Well, if that didn't ought to be the other way round!"

"I wish it was me she'd met in the Park," said Cedric sombrely. "I might

have gone back to Buckingham Palace with her and--"

"Go on, Emily, go on!" cried Alex impatiently. "Don't listen to Cedric.

What comes next?"

"The consequences was--whatever's here?" said Emily, pretending an

inability to decipher her own writing.

"Well, I never! The consequences was, a wedding-ring. Whoever went and

thought of that now? And the world said--"

The nursery door opened, and Alex shrieked, "Oh, finish it--quick!"

She knew instinctively that it was Nurse, and that Nurse would be

certain to disapprove of the new game.

"Don't you make that noise, Alex," said Nurse sharply. "You'll disturb

the baby with your screaming."

For a moment Alex wondered if the game was to be allowed to proceed, but

Barbara, well known to be Nurse's favourite, must needs say to her in an

amiable little voice, such as she never used to her brothers and sister:

"Emily's been teaching us such a funny new game, Nurse. Come and play

with us."

"I've no time to play, as you very well know, with all your clothes

wanting looking over the way they do," Nurse told her complacently.

"What's the game?"

Alex kicked Barbara under the table, but without much hope, and at the

same moment Cedric remarked very distinctly:

"It is called Consequences, and Archie met the Queen in the Park. I wish

it had been me instead."

"Well!" exclaimed Nurse. "That's the way you do when my back's turned,

Miss Emily, teaching them such vulgar, nonsensical games as that. Never

did I hear--now give me those papers this minute."

She did not wait to be given anything, but snatched the little slips out

of Emily's apron and threw them on to the fire.

"I'm not going to have no Consequences in _my_ nursery, and don't you

believe it!" remarked Nurse.

But omnipotent though Nurse was, in the eyes of the Clare children, she

could not altogether compass this feat.

There were consequences of all sorts.

Cedric, who was obstinate, and Barbara, also obstinate and rather sly as

well, continued to play at the new game in corners by themselves,

refusing to admit Alex to their society because she told them that they

were playing it all wrong. She knew that they were not playing it as

Emily had taught them, and was prepared to set them right, although she

felt uncertain, in the depths of her heart, as to whether she herself

could remember it all. But at least she knew more than Barbara, who was

silly and a copy-cat, or than Cedric, who had concentrated on the

possibilities the game presented to him of a hypothetical encounter

between himself and his Sovereign. The game for Cedric consisted in the

ever-lengthening conversation which took place under the heading of what

he said to her and what she replied. When Her Majesty proceeded, under

Cedric's laborious pencil, to invite him to drive her in her own

carriage-and-pair, to Buckingham Palace, Alex said scornfully that

Cedric was a silly little boy, and of course the Queen wouldn't say

_that_. To which Cedric turned a perfectly deaf ear, and continued

slowly to evolve amenities eminently satisfactory to his admiration for

Her Majesty. Alex went away, shrugging her shoulders, but secretly she

knew that Cedric's indifference had got the better of her. However much

she might laugh, with the other children, or sometimes, even, in a

superior way, with the grown-ups, when the children went into the

drawing-room, at Cedric's slowness, and his curious fashion of harping

upon one idea at a time, Alex was sub-consciously aware of Cedric as a

force, and one which could, ultimately, always defeat her own diffused,

unbalanced energies. If any one laughed at Alex, or despised one of her

many enthusiasms, she would quickly grow ashamed of it, and try to

pretend that she had never really been in earnest. In the same way, she

would affect qualities and instincts which did not belong to her, with

the hope of attracting, and of gaining affection.

But Cedric went his own way, as genuinely undisturbed by Nurse's

scoldings and hustlings as by his elder sister's mockery, which had its

origin in her secret longing to prove to herself, in spite of her own

inmost convictions, that she was the dominant spirit in her little

world.

It always made her angry when Cedric left her gibes unanswered, not from

a desire to provoke her further, but simply from his complete absorption

in the matter in hand, and his utter indifference to Alex's comments.

"Don't you hear what I say?" Alex asked sharply.

"No," said Cedric baldly. "I'm not listening. Don't interrupt me, Alex."

"You're playing it all wrong--you and Barbara. Two silly little babies,"

she cried angrily and incoherently. "And it's a stupid, vulgar game.

Nurse said so."

Although Alex had been the most enthusiastic of them all when Emily had

first taught her the game, she had at once begun to think it vulgar when

Nurse condemned it.

She would have nothing more to do with "Consequences." It was quite

likely that in a few days Barbara would get into one of her priggish,

perverse moods, and in a fit of temper with Cedric go and tell Nurse

that he was still indulging in the forbidden pastime. Alex thought she

might as well be out of it.

She was in trouble often enough in the nursery. Nurse always took

Barbara's part against her, and accused her of being violent and

over-bearing, and then Lady Isabel, the children's mother, would send

for her to her room while she dressed for dinner, and say complainingly:

"Alex, why do you quarrel so with the others? I shall send you to

school, if you can't be happy with Barbara at home."

"Oh, don't send me to school, mummy."

"Not if you're good."

"I will be good, really, I will."

"Very well, my child. Now ring for Hawkins, or I shall be late."

"May I stay and watch you put on your diamond things, mummy? Do let me."

And Lady Isabel always laughed, and let her stay, so that Alex

eventually went back to the nursery with an elated sense of having been

very good, and accorded privileges which never fell to the lot of

self-righteous Barbara.

She knew she was her mother's favourite, because she was the eldest, and

was often sent for to the drawing-room when there were people there.

Barbara, of course, was too ugly to go much to the drawing-room. Alex

would toss her own mane of silky brown curls, and draw herself up

conceitedly, as she thought of Barbara's pale face, and thin, attenuated

ringlets. Besides, Lady Isabel had said that Barbara really mustn't come

down again when "people" were there until her second teeth had put in

their tardy appearance. Even Cedric, though acclaimed as "quaint" and

"solemn" by his mother's friends, was too apt to make disconcerting

comments on their sparkling conversation, and would return to the

nursery in disgrace. Alex' only rival for downstairs' favour was little

Archie, who was only four, and at present a very pretty little boy. But

he was too small for Alex ever to feel jealous of him. The new baby,

christened with pomp in the big Catholic Church at the end of the

Square, Pamela Isabel, was, so far, a neglible quantity in the nursery

world.

She slept in the little room called the inner nursery, most of the day,

and was only with the others when they were taken into the Park or to

play in the square garden. Then Emily pushed the big pram that contained

the slumbering Pamela, and Nurse grasped the hands of Barbara and Archie

and dragged them over the crossings.

Cedric, by Nurse's express orders, always walked just in front of her

with Alex, and unwillingly submitted to having his hand held by his

sister.

"Not that I trust Alex for common sense," Nurse was careful to explain,

"not a yard, but so long as they're together I can keep an eye on both

and see they don't get under no hansom's feet. That boy's spectacles are

too downright uncanny for me to let him cross the road alone."

For Cedric was obliged to wear a large pair of round spectacles, without

which he could only see things that were very close to his eyes. He even

had another, different, pair for reading, which seemed to Alex an

exaggerated precaution, likely to increase Cedric's sense of his own

importance.

"Well," said Cedric. "You have a plate, and I haven't."

Alex's plate was an instrument of torture designed to push back two

prominent front teeth. It not only hurt her and kept her awake at night,

but was very disfiguring besides, and she passionately envied Barbara,

who at nine years old still had only gaps where her front teeth should

have been.

"Of course," Alex would sometimes declare grandly, repeating what she

had heard Lady Isabel say, "Barbara is dreadfully backward. She's such a

baby for her age. _I'm_ very old for my age."

But she only said this in the drawing-room, where it would provoke

kindly laughter or perhaps interested comment. In the nursery, Nurse

never suffered any airs and graces, as she called them, and would pounce

on Alex and shake her at the least hint of any such nonsense.

"Just you wait till you're sent to a good strict school, my lady, and

see what you'll get then," she told her threateningly.

"I'm not going to school. Mummy said I shouldn't go if I was good."

"We shall see what we shall see. Children as think themselves everybody

at home, gets whipped when they go to school," Nurse told her severely.

Alex was used to these prognostications. They did not alarm her very

much, because she did not think that she would be sent to school. She

knew instinctively that her father disapproved of ordinary girls'

schools, and that her mother disliked convents, and indeed most things

that had to do with religion.

Alex supposed that this was because Lady Isabel was a Protestant! She

thought that it was much the nicest religion to belong to, on the whole,

since it evidently imposed no obligations in the nature of church-going,

and she often wondered why her mother had let all her children be

Catholics, instead of Protestants like herself. It certainly couldn't be

because father cared which church the children went to, or whether they

went at all.

The only person in the house who did seem to care was Nurse, who took

Alex and Barbara and Cedric to High Mass at the Oratory every Sunday,

where there was a front bench reserved for them, with little cards in

brass frames planted at intervals along the ledge in front of them,

bearing the name of Sir Francis Clare.

Nurse put Barbara on one side of her and Alex on the other, and Cedric

on the outside, and was very particular about their kneeling down and

standing up at the right moment, and keeping the prayer-books open in

front of them. Alex and Barbara each had a _Garden of the Soul_, but

Cedric was only allowed _Holy Childhood_ which had pictures and

anecdotes illustrative of Vice and Virtue at the end.

Alex knew all the anecdotes by heart, and preferred her own

grown-up-looking book with its small, close print. She had long since

discovered that the one matter over which Nurse could be hoodwinked was

print, and that she might quite safely indulge herself in the perusal of

the pages devoted to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, or to a mysterious

ceremony called Churching after Child-birth, during the many dull

portions of the long service.

The only part of Church that held possibilities was when the little bell

rang at the Elevation, and every one bent his or her head as far down as

it would go over the bench. Alex always looked up surreptitiously, then,

to see if by any chance a miracle was taking place, or to watch Cedric's

invariable manœuvre of hanging on to the ledge by his teeth and hands

and trying to raise his feet from the floor at the same time.

Nurse was always piously bent double, her face hidden in her cotton

gloves, breathing stertorously with Barbara on the other side devotedly

imitating her, even to the production of strange sounds through her own

tightly-compressed lips.

After that, Alex always knew that the end of Church was near, and that

as soon as the priest had taken up his little square headgear and faced

the congregation for the last time, Nurse would begin to poke her

violently, as a sign that she was to get up and to make Cedric pick up

his cap and his gloves.

Then came the genuflection as they filed out between the benches, and

Nurse was always very particular that this should be done properly,

frequently pressing a heavy hand on Alex's shoulder until her knee

bumped painfully against the stone floor. The final ceremony connected

with the children's religion took place at the door, when Cedric had to

make his way through rustling skirts and an occasional pair of black

trousers to the big stone basin of holy water. Into this, standing on

tiptoe with immense difficulty, he plunged as much of his hand as was

necessary to satisfy the sharp inspection of Nurse when he returned,

proffering dripping fingers to her and to his sisters.

The last perfunctory sign of the cross made then, the worst of Sunday,

in Alex's opinion, was over.

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner was pleasant. Mademoiselle

did not come in the afternoon, and Nurse generally went out and left

Emily in charge. In the summer she took the children to sit in the

Square garden--the Park on Sundays was not allowed--and in the winter

they always walked as far as the Albert Memorial, for which Cedric

entertained a great admiration.

Sunday was Lady Isabel's At Home day and the children, except during the

season, always went down to the drawing-room after tea, Alex and Barbara

in pale, rose-coloured frocks with innumerable frills at throat and

wrists, and a small pad fastened under each skirt so that it might stand

well out at the back. Cedric, like most other little boys of his age and

standing, was forced to wear a Lord Fauntleroy suit, from which his

cropped bullet head and spectacles emerged incongruously.

The half-hour in the drawing-room was not enjoyed by the others as it

was by Alex, especially if there were many visitors. She would lean

against Lady Isabel confidently, and hear people say how like she was to

her mother, which always delighted her. Her mother looked so pretty,

sitting on the sofa with her fringe beautifully curled and a lovely

dress that was half a teagown, the tight bodice coming down into a sharp

point in front and behind, and the skirt falling into long folds, with a

train sweeping the ground, and huge loops and bows of soft ribbon

draping it cross-wise.

Barbara was incurably shy, and poked her head when she was spoken to,

but very few people took as much notice of her as of talkative Alex or

pretty little Archie, who was all blue ribbons and fearless smiles. And

before very long Lady Isabel was sure to say:

"Now, you'd better run back to the nursery, hadn't you, darlings? or

Nurse will be comin' down in search of you. I've got the most invaluable

old dragon for them," she generally added to her friends. "She's been

with us since Alex was a baby, and rules the whole house."

"Oh, don't send them away!" one of the visiting ladies would exclaim

politely. "_Such_ darlings!"

"Oh, but I must! Their father won't _hear_ of my spoilin' them. Now run

along, infants."

Cedric and Barbara were only too ready to obey, though it was understood

that Lady Isabel's "run along" only meant a very ceremonious departure

from the room, Barbara taking little Archie by the hand and leading him

to the door, where they both dropped the obeisance considered

"picturesque," and Cedric making an unwilling progress to execute his

carefully practised bow before each one of the ladies scattered about

the big room.

If Alex, however, was enjoying herself, and getting the notice that her

soul loved, she always said in a pleading whisper, loud enough to be

heard by two or three people besides her mother:

"Oh, do let me stay with you a little longer, mummy. Don't send me

upstairs yet!"

"How sweet! Do let her stay, dear Lady Isabel."

"You mustn't encourage me to spoil her. She ought to go up with the

others."

"Just for this once, mummy."

"Well, just for this once, perhaps. After all," said Lady Isabel

apologetically, "she _is_ the eldest. She'll be comin' out before I know

where I am!"

And Alex would enjoy the privilege of being the eldest, and sit beside

her mother, listening to the conversation, and sometimes joining in with

remarks that she thought might be acclaimed as amusing or original, or

even merely precocious. No wonder that the nursery greeted her return

with disdain. Even Emily called her "drawing-room child," and by her

contempt brought Alex' ready tears of mortified vanity to the surface.

But it was much worse on the rare Sunday afternoons when Nurse was in,

when she would greatly resent the slight to Barbara if she was sent up

from the drawing-room before her sister.

"Working on your mamma to spoil you like that, just because you're a

couple of years older!" Nurse would say, pulling the comb fiercely

through Alex' hair as she went to bed.

"I'm three whole years older."

"Don't you contradict me like that, Alex. I'm not going to have any

showing-off up here, I can tell you. You can keep those airs and graces

for your mamma's friends in the drawing-room."

Alex generally went to bed in tears.

If Nurse had not been scolding her, then Barbara had been quarrelling

with her. They always quarrelled whenever Barbara ventured to differ

from Alex and take up an attitude of her own, or still more when Barbara

and Cedric made an alliance together and excluded Alex's autocratic

ruling of their games.

"But it is for your good," she would tell them passionately. "I want to

show you a better way. It'll be much more fun if you do it my

way--you'll see."

But they did not want to see.

Their obstinacy always brought to Alex the same sense of incredulous,

resentful fury. How _could_ they not want to be shown the best way of

doing things, when she knew it and they didn't? And, of course, she

always did know it. Was she not the eldest?

It was not till Alex was almost thirteen that her belief in her own

infallibility as eldest received a rude shock.

She nearly killed Barbara.

It was the first week of August, and Sir Francis and Lady Isabel had

gone to Scotland. The children were going to the sea with Nurse on the

following day, and took advantage of her state of excitement over the

packing, and the emptiness of the downstair rooms, to play at circus on

the stairs. Emily only said, "Now don't go hurting yourselves, whatever

you do, or there'll be no seaside tomorrow," and then went back to amuse

Pamela, who was crying and restless from the heat.

"I'll tell you what!" said Alex. "We'll have tight-rope dancing. I'm

tired of learned pigs and things like that--" This last impersonation

having been perseveringly rendered by Cedric with much shuffling and

snorting over a pack of cards.

"Give me the skipping-rope, Barbara."

"Why?" said Barbara, whining.

"Because I say so," replied her sister, stamping her foot. "I've got an

idea."

"It's my skipping-rope."

"But if you don't give it to me we can't have the tight-rope dancing,"

said Alex in despair.

"I don't care. Why should you do tight-rope dancing with my

skipping-rope?"

"You shall do it first--you shall do it all yourself, if you'll only let

me show you," Alex cried in an agony of impatience.

On this inducement Barbara slowly parted with her skipping-rope, and let

Alex knot it hastily and insecurely to the newel post on the first

landing above the hall.

"Now just get up on to the post, Barbara, and I'll hold the other end of

the rope like this, and you'll see--"

"But I can't, I should fall off."

"Don't be such a little muff; I'll hold you on."

"No, no--I'm frightened. Let Cedric do it."

"No," said Cedric. "I'm being a learned pig." He went down the short

flight of stairs and sat firmly down upon the tiled floor with the pack

of cards out-spread before him.

"Now come on, Barbara," Alex commanded her; "I'll hold you."

Between hoisting and pulling and Barbara's own dread of disobeying her,

Alex got her sister into a kneeling position on the broad flat top of

the newel post.

"Now stand up, and then I'll hold out the rope. You'll be the famous

tight-rope dancer crossing the Falls of Niagara."

"Alex, I'm frightened."

"What of, silly? If you did fall it's only a little way on to the

stairs, and I'll catch you. Besides, you'll feel much safer when you're

standing up."

Barbara, facing the stairs, and with her back to the alarming void

between her perch and the hall-floor, rose trembling to her feet.

"You look splendid," said Alex. "Now then!" She jerked at the rope, and

at the same instant Barbara screamed and tried to clutch at her.

Alex caught hold of her sister's ankles, felt Barbara's weight slip

suddenly, and screamed aloud as a shriek and crash that seemed

simultaneous proclaimed Barbara's fall backwards into the hall.

Cedric and Barbara in a confused struggling heap on the floor--doors

opening upstairs and in the basement--the flying feet of the

servants--all was an agonized nightmare to Alex until Barbara, limp and

inert on Nurse's lap, suddenly began to scream and cry, calling out, "My

back! my back!"

They hushed her at last, and Nurse carried her into the boudoir, which

was the nearest room, and laid her down on the broad sofa. Then Alex

became aware of a monotonous sound that had struck on her ear without

penetrating to her senses ever since the accident happened.

"My spectacles are broken. You've broken my spectacles," reiterated a

lamentable voice.

"You horrid, heartless little boy, Cedric! When poor Barbara--" Sobs

choked her.

"I like that!" said Cedric. "When it was all you that made her fall at

all--and break my spectacles."

"What's that?" said Nurse, miraculously reappearing. "All you, was it? I

might have known it, you mischievous wicked child. Tell me what

happened, this minute."

But Alex was screaming and writhing on the floor, feeling as though she

must die of such misery, and it was Cedric who gave the assembled

household a judicial version of the accident.

The doctor came and telegrams were sent to Scotland, which brought back

Lady Isabel, white-faced and tearful, and Sir Francis, very stern and

monosyllabic.

"Father, my spectacles are broken," cried Cedric earnestly, running to

meet them, but they did not seem to hear him.

"Where is she, Nurse?" said Lady Isabel.

"In the boudoir, my lady, and better, thank Heaven. The doctor says her

back'll get right again in time."

Alex, hanging shaking over the balustrade, saw that Nurse was making

faces as though she were crying. But when she came upstairs, after a

long time spent with Lady Isabel in the boudoir, and saw Alex, her face

was quite hard again, and she gave her a push and said, "It's no use

crying those crocodile tears now. You should have thought of that before

trying to kill Barbara the way you did."

"I didn't, I didn't," sobbed Alex.

But nobody paid any attention to her.

Good-natured Emily was sent away, because Nurse said she wasn't fit to

be trusted, and Cook, who was Emily's aunt, and very angry about it all,

told Alex that it was all her fault if poor Emily never got another

place at all. Everything was Alex' fault.

There was no going to the seaside, even after Barbara was pronounced

better. But Lady Isabel, who, Nurse said, had been given a dreadful

shock by Alex' wickedness, was going into the country, and would take

Archie and the baby with her, if they could get a new nursery-maid at

once.

"And me and Cedric?" asked Alex, trembling.

"Cedric doesn't give me no trouble, as you very well know, and he'll

stay here and help me amuse poor little Barbara, as has always got on

with him so nicely."

"Shall I stay and play with Barbara too?"

"She's a long way from playing yet," Nurse returned grimly. "And I

should think the sight of you would throw her into a fit, after what's

passed."

"But what will happen to me, Nurse?" sobbed Alex.

"Your Papa will talk to you," said Nurse.

Such a thing had never happened to any of the children before, but Alex,

trembling and sick from crying, found herself confronting Sir Francis in

the dining-room.

"I am going to send you to school, Alex," he told her. "How old are

you?"

"Twelve."

"Then I hope," said Sir Francis gravely, "that you are old enough to

understand what a terrible thing it is to be sent from home in disgrace

for such a reason. I am told that you have the deplorable reputation of

originating quarrels with your brothers and sister, who, but for you,

would lead the normal existence of happily-circumstanced children."

Alex was terrified. She could not answer these terrible imputations, and

began to cry convulsively.

"I see," said Sir Francis, "that you are sensible of the appalling

lengths to which this tendency has led you. Even now, I can scarcely

believe it--a harmless, gentle child like your little sister, who, I am

assured, has never done you wilful injury in her life--that you should

deliberately endanger her life and her reason in such a fashion."

He paused, as though he were waiting for Alex to speak, but she could

not say anything.

"If your repentance is sincere, as I willingly assume it to be, your

future behaviour must be such as to lead us all, particularly your poor

little sister, to forget this terrible beginning."

"Will Barbara get well?"

"By the great mercy of Heaven, and owing to her extreme youth, we are

assured by the doctor that a year or two will entirely correct the

injury to the spine. Had it been otherwise, Alex--" Sir Francis looked

at his daughter in silence.

"When thanking Heaven for the mercy which has preserved your sister's

life," he said gently, "I hope you will reflect seriously upon redeeming

this action by your future conduct."

"Oh, I'm sorry--oh, shall you ever forgive me?" gasped Alex, amongst her

sobs.

"I do forgive you, my child, as does your mother, and as I am convinced

that little Barbara will do. But I cannot, nor would I if I could, avert

from you the consequence of your own act," said her father.

Barbara did forgive Alex, in a little, plaintive, superior voice, as she

lay very white and straight in bed. She was to stay quite flat on her

back for at least a year, the doctor said, and she need do no lessons,

and later she would be taken out in a long flat carriage that could be

pushed from behind, then she would be able to walk again, and her back

would be quite straight.

"If she'd been a hunchback, we might have played circus again, and I

could have been the learned pig," said Cedric reflectively.

Alex went to school at the end of September.

And that was her first practical experience of the game of Consequences,

as played by the freakish hand of fate.

II

School

Alex' schooldays were marked by a series of emotional episodes.

In her scale of values, only the personal element counted for anything.

She was intelligent and industrious at her classes when she wished to

gain the approbation of an attractive class-mistress, and idle and

inattentive when she wanted to please the pretty girl with yellow hair,

who sat next her and read a story-book under cover of a French grammar.

Alex did not read; she wanted to make the yellow-haired girl look at her

and smile at her. She thought Queenie Torrance beautiful, though her

beauty did not strike Alex until after she had fallen a helpless victim

to one of those violent, irrational attractions for one of her own sex,

that are apt to assail feminine adolescence.

"I hope that you will find some nice little companions at Liège," Sir

Francis had gravely told his daughter in valediction, "but remember that

exclusive friendships are not to be desired. Friendly with all, familiar

with none," said Sir Francis, voicing the ideal of his class and of his

period.

As well tell a stream not to flow downhill. Nothing but the most

exclusive and inordinate of attachments lay within the scope of Alex'

emotional capacities. She was incapable alike of asking or of bestowing

in moderation.

Theoretically she would tell herself that she would give all, trust,

confidence, love, friendship, and ask for nothing in return. Practically

she suffered tortures of jealousy if the loved one addressed a word or

smile to any but herself, and cried herself to sleep night after night

in the certainty of loving infinitely more than she was loved.

The material side of her life as a _pensionnaire_ at the Liège convent

made very little impression upon her, excepting in relation to the

emotional aspect, of which she was never unaware.

To the end of her days, the clean, pungent smell of a certain polish

used upon the immense spaces of bare _parquet ciré_ all over the

building, would serve to recall the vivid presentment of the tall

Belgian _postulante_ whose duty it was to apply it with a huge mop, and

whom, from a distance only to be appreciated by those who know the

immensity of the gulf that in the convent world separates the novice

from the pupils, Alex had worshipped blindly.

And the acrid, yet not unpleasant taste of _confiture_ thinly spread

over thick slices of brown bread, would remind her with equal vividness

of the daily three o'clock interval for _goûter_, with Queenie Torrance

pacing beside her in the garden quadrangle, one hand of each rolled into

her black-stuff apron to try and keep warm, and the other grasping the

enormous double _tartine_ that formed the afternoon's refection.

Even the slight, steady sound of hissing escaping from a gas jet of

which the flame is turned as high as it will go, stood to Alex for the

noisy evening recreation, spent in the enforced and detested amusement

of _la ronde_, when her only preoccupation was to place herself by the

object of her adoration, for the grasp of her hand in its regulation

cotton glove, as the circle of girls moved drearily round and round

singing perfunctorily.

The tuneless tune of those _rondes_ remained with Alex long after the

words had lost the savour of irony with which novelty had once invested

them.

_"Quelle horrible attente_

_D'être postulante...._

_Quel supplice_

_D'être une novice_

_Ah! quel comble d'horreur_

_Devenir sœur de chœur...."_

Alex' symbols were not romantic ones, but there was no romance in the

life of the Liège convent, save what she brought to it herself. Even the

memory of the great square _verger_, in the middle of gravelled alleys,

brought to her mind for sole token of summer, only her horror of the

immense pale-red slugs that crawled slowly and interminably out and

across the paths in the eternal rains of the Belgian climate. Nothing

mattered but people.

And of all the people in the world, only those whom one loved.

Thus Alex' sweeping, unformulated conviction, holding in it all the

misapplication of an essential force, squandered for lack of a sense of

proportion.

She despised herself secretly, both for her intense craving for

affection and for her prodigality in bestowing it. She was like a child

endeavouring to pour a great pailful of water into a very little cup.

Waste and disaster were the inevitable results.

The real love of Alex' young enthusiasm, fair-haired Queenie Torrance,

was preceded by her inarticulate, unreasoned adoration for the Belgian

_postulante_. But the Belgian _postulante_ was never visible, save at a

distance, so that even Alex' unreasonable affections found nothing to

feed upon.

There was a French girl, much older than herself, for whom Alex then

conceived an enthusiasm. Marie-Angèle smiled on her and encouraged the

infatuation of the curiously un-English little English girl. But she

gave her nothing in return. Alex knew it, and recklessly spent all her

weekly pocket-money on flowers and sweets for Marie-Angèle, thinking

that the gifts would touch her and awaken in her an affection that it

was not her nature to bestow, least of all on an ardent and ungainly

child, six years her junior. Alex shed many tears for Marie-Angèle, and

years later read some words that suddenly and swiftly recalled the girl

who passed in and out of her life in less than a year.

_"I love you for your few caresses,_

_I love you for my many tears"_

The lines, indeed, were curiously typical of the one-sided relations

into which Alex entered so rashly and so inevitably throughout her

schooldays.

She was fifteen, and had been nearly three years at Liège, when Queenie

Torrance came. She was Alex' senior by a year, and the only other

English girl in the school at that time. Alex was told to look after

her, and went to the task with a certain naïve eagerness, that she

always brought to bear upon any personal equation. In an hour, she was

secretly combating an enraptured certainty, of which she felt

nevertheless ashamed, that she had found at last the ideal object on

whom to expend the vehement powers of affection for which she was always

seeking an outlet.

Queenie was slight, very fair, with a full, serious oval face, innocent

grey eyes set very far apart, and the high, rounded forehead and small,

full-lipped mouth, of a type much in vogue in England at the time of the

Regency. This was the more marked by the thick flaxen hair which fell

back from her face, and over her shoulders into natural heavy ringlets.

She was not very pretty, although she was often thought so, but she was

charged with a certain animal magnetism, almost inseparable from her

type. Half the girls in the school adored her. Queenie, already

attractive to men, and sent to the convent in Belgium in reality on that

account, nominally for a year's finishing before her début in London

society, was for the most part scornful of these girlish admirers, but

Alex she admitted to her friendship.

She was precociously aware that intimacy with Lady Isabel Clare's

daughter was likely to accrue to her own advantage later on in London.

The genius for sympathy which led Alex to innumerable small sacrifices

and tender smoothings of difficulties for her idol, Queenie at first

received with a graceful gratitude which yet held in it something of

suspicion, as though she wondered what return would presently be exacted

of her.

But it became obvious that Alex expected nothing, and received with

eager thankfulness the slightest recognition of her devotion.

Queenie despised her, but was lavish of gentle thanks and caressing

exclamations. Hers was not a nature ever to make the mistake of killing

the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Finding to her concealed astonishment that Alex only asked toleration,

or at the most acceptance of her ardent devotion, and was transported at

the slightest occasional token of affection in return, Queenie stinted

her of neither. It would have seemed to her the most irrational folly to

discourage a love, however one-sided, that found its expression in

tireless sympathy, endless championship, and unlimited material gifts

and help of any or every description. Alex did all that she could of

Queenie's lessons, made her bed and mended her clothes for her whenever

she could do so undetected by the authorities, spent her pocket-money on

gratifying Queenie's shameless and inordinate passion for sweet things,

and once or twice told lies badly and unsuccessfully, to shield Queenie

from the effects of her own laziness and constant evasion of

regulations.

Alex had been taught, in common with every other child of her upbringing

and nationality, that to tell a lie was the worst crime to which a

self-respecting human being can stoop. She also believed that a person

who has told a lie is a liar, and that all liars go to Hell. Yet by some

utterly illogical perversity of which she was hardly even aware, it did

not shock or very much distress her, to find that Queenie Torrance told

lies, and told them, moreover, with an air of quiet and convincing

candour that placed them in a very different category to Alex' own

halting, improbable fibs, delivered with a scarlet face and a manifest

air of hunting for further corroboration as she spoke.

In the extraordinary scale of moral values unconsciously held by Alex,

there were apparently no abstract standards of right and wrong. Where

she loved, though she might, against her own will see defects, she was

incapable of condemning.

Queenie took a curious, detached interest in coldly gratifying her

vanity, by seeking to test the lengths of extravagance to which Alex'

admiration would go.

"Supposing I quarrelled with every one here, and they all sent me to

Coventry--whose part would you take?"

"Yours, of course."

"But if I were in the wrong?"

"That wouldn't make any difference. In fact, you'd need it more if you

were in the wrong."

"I don't see that!" Queenie exclaimed. "If I were in the wrong I should

have deserved it."

"But that would make it all the worse for you. It's always the people

who are in the wrong who need most to have their part taken," Alex

explained confusedly, yet voicing an intimate conviction.

"I don't think you have much idea of justice, Alex," said Queenie drily.

The conversation made Alex very miserable. It was characteristic of her

want of logic that while she reproached herself secretly for her own

impiety in setting the objects of her affection far above what she

conceived to be the abstract standard of right and wrong, yet she never

questioned but that any love bestowed upon herself would be measured out

in direct proportion to her merits.

And despairingly did Alex sometimes review the smallness of her deserts.

She was disobedient, untruthful, quarrelsome, irreligious. It seemed to

Alex that there was no fault to which she could not lay claim. Her lack

of elementary religious teaching put her at a disadvantage in the

convent atmosphere, and made its frequent religious services and

instructions so tedious to her, that she was in constant disgrace for

her weary, inattentive attitudes, not unjustly designated as irreverent,

in the chapel.

She was not at all popular with the nuns. The "influence" which her

class-mistress wielded over so many of the pupils, or the "interest"

which the English Assistant Superior would so willingly have extended to

her youthful compatriot were alike without effect upon Alex. She was not

drawn to any of these holy, black-clad women, to one or other of whom

almost all her French and Belgian and American contemporaries devoted a

rather stereotyped enthusiasm.

Had the vagrant fancy of Alex lighted upon any one of the elder nuns

charged with the direction of the school, the attraction would have been

discreetly permitted, if not admittedly sanctioned, by the authorities.

It would almost inevitably have led Alex to an awakening of religious

sensibilities and the desirability of this result would have outweighed,

even if it did not absolutely obscure in the eyes of the nuns, the

excessive danger of obtaining such a result by such means.

But the stars in their courses had designed that Alex should regard the

Mesdames Marie Baptiste and Marie Evangeliste of her convent days with

indifference, and devote her ardent temperament and precocious

sensibilities to the worship of Queenie Torrance.

The enthusiasm was smiled upon by no one, and thereby became the more

inflamed.

"Je n'aime pas ces amitiés particulières," said the class-mistress of

Queenie Torrance severely, to which Miss Torrance replied with polite

distress that she was powerless in the matter. It made her ridiculous,

she disliked the constant infringement of rules to which Alex' pursuit

exposed her, but--one could not be unkind. She did not know why Alex

Clare showed her especial affection--she herself had done nothing to

encourage these indiscreet displays. Of course, it was pleasant to be

liked, but one wished only to do right about it. Queenie mingled candour

with perplexity, and succeeded in convincing every one with perfect

completeness of her entire innocence of anything but a too potent

attraction.

"Ce n'est donc même pas une amitié? C'est Alex qui vous recherche malgré

vous!" exclaimed the class-mistress.

Under this aspect the question soon presented itself alike to the

_pensionnat_ and its authorities, rendering Alex ridiculous. In a system

of _surveillance_ which admitted of no loophole for open defiance or

outspoken rebuke, Alex' evasions of that law of detachment which is the

primary one in convent legislation, became the mark of every

blue-ribboned _enfant de Marie_ who wished to obtain a reputation for

zeal by reporting the defection of a companion to her class-mistress.

It was always Alex who was reported. Queenie never sought opportunities

to snatch a hurried colloquy during recreation, or manœuvred to obtain

Alex as companion at _la ronde_, or when they played games in the

garden. She never infringed one of the strictest rules of the

establishment, by giving presents unpermitted, or purchasing forbidden

sweets and chocolate to be given away at the afternoon _goûter_.

Queenie accepted the presents, wrote tiny notes to Alex and skilfully

gave them to her unperceived, and cut Alex to the heart by telling her

sometimes that she made it very hard for one to try and be good and keep

all the rules and perhaps get one's blue ribbon next term.

These speeches were to Queenie's credit, and made Alex cry and worship

her more admiringly than ever, but they did not tend to lower the

transparent, doglike devotion with which Alex would gaze at Queenie's

bent profile in the chapel, utterly unconscious of the scandal which her

manifest idolatry was creating for the severe nun in the carved stall

opposite. She was scolded, placed under strict observation, and every

obstacle placed in the way of her exchanging any word with Queenie,

until she grew to see herself as a martyr to an affection which every

fresh prohibition increased almost to frenzy.

One day she was made the victim of a form of rebuke much dreaded by the

_pensionnaires_. A monthly convocation of the school and mistresses,

officially known as _la réclame du mois_, and nicknamed by the children

"the Last Judgment," was held in the _Grande Salle_ downstairs, with the

Superior making her state entry after the children had been decorously

seated in rows at the end of the long room, and all the other nuns who

had anything to do with the school had placed themselves gravely and

with folded hands against the walls.

They all stood when the Superior came in, followed by the First

Mistress, carrying a sheaf of notes and a great book, which each pupil

firmly believed to be devoted principally to the record of her own

progress through the school.

Then the Superior, with inclined head and low, distinct voice, spoke a

few words of prayer, and settled herself in the large chair behind which

the nuns clustered in orderly rows.

The children sat down at the signal given, and listened, at first with

smiles as the record of the baby class were read aloud and each mite

stood up in her place for all the universe to gaze at her, while the

analysis of her month's work, mental and moral, sounded with appalling

distinctness through the silence.

"Bébée de Lalonde! première en catéchisme, première en géographie ...

calcul, beaucoup mieux ... elle y met beaucoup de bonne volonté!"

"A la bonne heure!"

The Superior is smiling, every one is smiling, Bébée de Lalonde, her

brown curls bobbing over her face, is pink with gratification. Her young

class-mistress leans forward, the white veil of novice falling over her

black habit.

"Ma Mère Supérieure, pour le mois de S. Joseph, elle se corrige de cette

vilaine habitude de mordre ses ongles. Elle a fait de vrais efforts...."

"C'est bien. Faites voir.... Venez, ma petite."

Up the long room marches Bébée, two freshly washed tiny pink hands

thrust out proudly for the Superior's inspection.

"Très bien, très bien. Vous ferez bien attention au pouce droit, n'est

pas?"

The Superior is quite grave, however, every one laughs, and then the

serious part of the proceedings begins.

The very little ones are not nervous. Most of them are good, even the

naughty ones only get a very gentle homily from the Superior. Then their

class-mistress claps her hands smartly and they get up and file out of

the room, it not being considered politic to let _les petites_ hear the

record of that pen of black sheep, _les moyennes_.

The indictments become more serious. Marie Thérèse, twice impertinent to

a mistress, taking no trouble over her lessons, worst of all, taking no

trouble to cure that trick of which we have complained so often--sitting

with her knees crossed.

"Even in the chapel, Ma Mère Supérieure."

This is very bad! It is unladylike, it is against all rules, it is

extremely immodest.... And what an example!

Marie Thérèse, says the Superior decisively, can abandon all hope of

obtaining the green ribbon of an _aspirante enfant de Marie_ until she

has reformed her ways. The mention of a première in literature gains no

approving smile from any one and Marie Thérèse sits down in tears.

Gabrielle, Marthe, Sadie--all through the three classes of the _moyenne_

division of the school, with very few stainless reports and two or three

disastrous ones.

Then _les grandes_. The first of these, in the lowest section, is a name

to which the reader, a French woman, always takes exception. She finally

compresses her lips and renders it as: "Kevinnie!"

Queenie is always cool and unmoved as she stands up, and Alex always

looks at her. At this particular _séance_, the April one, she took her

glances more or less surreptitiously, miserably aware that she had not

enough self-control to refrain from them and so avoid risking a rebuke

later on.

Queenie held no première. She was always last in her form,

undistinguished at music, drawing, needlework, anything requiring

application or talent alike. But her perfectly serene complacency was

more or less justified by the exaggerated applause of her companions at

her faultless "conduct" marks and the assurance of her class-mistress,

always given readily, that she was "très docile, très appliquée."

Queenie's popularity was independent of anything extraneous to herself.

The Superior leant forward and asked a question in a low voice.

"Non, ma Mère Supérieure, non."

The denial of a possible accusation, of which Alex guessed the purport,

was emphatic. She felt glad and relieved, but had no suspicions as to

the indictment following on her own name.

"Alexandra Clare," said Mère Alphonsine sonorously, and Alex stood up.

She no longer felt self-conscious over the ordeal, and was indifferent

to the habitual litany of complaints as to her unlearnt lessons,

disregard of the rule of silence, and frequent bad marks for disorder

and unpunctuality. But to the accusations which she knew by heart, and

shared with the majority of the _moyenne classe_, came a quite

unexpected addition, hissed out with a sort of dramatic horror by Mère

Alphonsine:

"Alex recherche Kevinnie sans cesse, ma Mère Supérieure."

Only those familiar with the code of _pensionnaire_ discipline in

Belgium during the years when Alex Clare and her contemporaries were at

school, can gauge the full heinousness of the offence, gravest in the

conventual decalogue.

Even Alex, although she had been scolded and punished and made the

subject of innumerable homilies, some of them pityingly reproachful, and

others explanatorily so, on the same question, felt as though she had

never before realized the extent of her own perversion.

She stood up, her hands in the regulation position, pushed under the

hideous black-stuff pèlerine that fell from her stiff, hard, white

collar to the shapeless waistband of her skirt, the whole uniform

carefully designed to conceal and obscure the lines of the figure

beneath it.

Overwhelmed with uncomprehending misery and acute shame, she heard two

or three of the mistresses add each her quota, for the most part

regretfully and with an evident sense of duty overcoming reluctance, to

the evidence against her.

"She seeks opportunity to place herself next to Queenie at almost every

recreation, ma Mère Supérieure."

"I am afraid that even in the chapel she lets this folly get the better

of her--one can see how she lets herself go to distractions all the

time...."

So the charges went on.

The summing up of Ma Mère Supérieure was icily condemnatory. She had

tried every means with Alex, had spoken to her with kindness and

tenderness; in private, had reasoned with her and finally threatened

her, and now a public denouncement must be tried, since all these means

had proved to be without effect.

Alex was principally conscious of the single, lightning-swift flash of

reproach that had shot from the eyes of Queenie Torrance into hers.

How silently and viciously Queenie would resent this public coupling of

her immaculate reputation with Alex' idiotic infatuation, only Alex

knew.

With the frantic finality of youth, she wondered whether she could go on

living. Oh, if only she might die at once, without hearing further blame

or reproach, without encountering the ridicule of her companions or the

cold withdrawal of Queenie's precariously-held friendship. Alex cried

herself sick with terror and shame and utterly ineffectual remorse.

The despair that invades an undeveloped being is the blackest in the

world, because of its utter want of perspective.

Alex could see nothing beyond the present. She felt all the weight of an

inexpressible guilt upon her, and all the utter isolation of spirit

which surrounds the sinner who stands exposed and condemned.

She knew that nobody would take her part. She was young enough to

reflect forlornly that an accusation mattered nothing if unjust, since

the consciousness of innocence would sustain one, serene and

unfaltering, through any ordeal.

But she had no consciousness of innocence. She saw herself eternally

different from her companions, eternally destined to lose her way,

wickedly and shamefully she supposed, without volition of her own she

knew, amongst those standards to which the right thinking conformed, and

which she, only, failed to recognize. With sick wistfulness Alex sought

Queenie's glance as they came one by one into the refectory, after the

_réclame_ was over.

Queenie's fair, opaque face was as colourless as ever, her eyes were

cast down.

Frantically, Alex willed her to cast one look of pity or forgiveness in

her direction, but Queenie passed on to the refectory where the

children's mid-day meal was waiting for them without a sign.

Amidst all the blur of emotions, passionate remorse and hopeless

loneliness, which made up Alex' schooldays, that Saturday mid-day meal

stood out in its black despair.

The choking attempts to swallow a mass of vegetable cooking, made salt

and sodden with her own streaming tears, the sobs that strangled her and

broke in spite of all her efforts into the decorous silence of the

refectory, even the awed and scandalized glances that the younger

children cast at her distorted face, remained saliently before her

memory for years.

At last the nun in charge rose from her place at the end of the room and

came down and told Alex that she might leave the table. The long

progress down the endless length of the refectory destroyed the last

remnants of Alex' self-control.

The tide of emotional agony that swept over her was to ebb and flow

again, and many times again.

But only once or twice was that high-water mark to be reached, that

bitter wave to engulf her, and each time add to the undermining of that

small stability of spirit with which Alex had been endowed.

She left the misery of that black Saturday behind her, and was left with

her childish nerves a little shattered, her childish confidence of

outlook rather more overshadowed, her childish strength less steady,

and, above all, set fast in her childish mind the ineradicable,

unexplained conviction that because she had loved Queenie Torrance and

had been punished and rebuked for it, therefore to love was wrong.

III

Queenie Torrance

School days in Belgium went on, through the steamy, rain-sodden days of

spring to the end of term and the _grandes vacances_ looked forward to

with such frantic eagerness even by the children who liked the convent

best. Alex was again bitterly conscious of an utter want of conformity

setting her apart from her fellow-creatures.

The misery of parting for eight weeks from Queenie Torrance overwhelmed

her. Casually, Queenie said:

"I may not come back, next term. I shall be seventeen by then, and I

don't see why I should be at school any longer if I can get round

father."

"What would you do?"

"Why, come out, of course," said Queenie. "I am quite old enough, and

every one says I look older than I am."

She moved her head about slightly so as to get sidelong views of her own

reflection in the big window-pane. There were no looking-glasses at the

convent.

It was true that, in spite of a skin smooth and unlined as a baby's and

the childish, semicircular comb that gathered back the short flaxen

ringlets from her rounded, innocent brow, Queenie's slender, but very

well-developed figure and the unvarying opaque pallor of her complexion,

made her look infinitely nearer maturity than the slim, long-legged

American girls, or over-plump, giggling French and Belgian ones. Alex

gazed at her with mute, exaggerated despair on her face.

"Your parents will permit that you make your début at once, yes?"

queried Marthe Poupard, as one resigned to the incredible folly and

weakness of British and American parents.

"I can manage my father," said Queenie gently, and with the perfect

conviction of experience in her voice.

As the day of the breaking-up drew nearer, discipline insensibly

relaxed, and Queenie suddenly became less averse from responding in some

degree to Alex' wistful advances.

On the last day, one of broiling heat, the two spent the afternoon alone

together unrebuked, in a corner of the great _verger_ where the pupils

were scattered in groups, feeling as though the holidays had already

begun.

"I shall have the journey with you," said Alex, piteously.

"Madame Hippolyte is taking us over, with one of the lay-sisters," said

Queenie, naming the most vigilant of the older French nuns. "So it will

be much better if we don't talk together on the boat. You know there

will be the three Munroe girls as well, because they are going to spend

their holidays in Devonshire or somewhere."

"How do you know it will be Madame Hippolyte?" said Alex disconsolately.

The authority deputed to conduct pupils on the journey to and from Liège

was one of the many items in the convent curriculum always shrouded in

impenetrable mystery until the actual moment of departure.

"I overheard two of them talking about it, in the linen-room this

morning," placidly said Queenie. "I kept behind the door."

Part of her curious attractiveness was, that she never attempted to

disguise or deny certain practices which Alex had been taught to

consider as dishonourable.

Alex counted this as but one more stone in the edifice erected for the

worship of her idol. It was not until she saw Queenie Torrance long

after, in other relations and other surroundings, that she dimly

realized how much of that streak of extraordinary candour was the direct

product of a magnificently justified self-confidence in the potency of

her own attraction, needing no enhancement from moral or mental

attributes.

"Do you always live in London, Alex?"

"Yes, in Clevedon Square. You know, I told you about it, Queenie."

"Yes, I know, but I only wondered if perhaps you had a house in the

country as well."

"No. Father and mother go to Scotland in the summer, and generally they

send us to the seaside with Nurse and a governess or some one."

"I see," said Queenie reflectively. She had wondered if perhaps the

Clares had a country house to which she, as a favourite school friend,

would be asked to stay.

"Father hates the country," said Alex. "We are sure to be in London for

a little while in September, before I come back here. Would you--would

you--" She gulped and clasped her hands nervously. Certain of Lady

Isabel's rules and recommendations rushed to her mind, but she

desperately tried to ignore them.

"I suppose you would not come to tea with me one day, if I were allowed

to ask you? Oh, if _only_ your mother knew my mother!"

Smoothly Queenie took her cue. "Of course, mother won't let me go to tea

with any one--unless she knows them herself--but I don't know.... What

Club does your father belong to?"

"Two or three, I think," said Alex, surprised. "He often goes to

Arthur's or the Turf Club."

"So does father. Perhaps we could manage it that way," said Queenie

reflectively.

She had every intention of cultivating her friendship with Alex Clare in

London.

"Then you'd like to come, Queenie?" breathed Alex ecstaticly.

"Of course, I would," Queenie told her affectionately. "My dear, you

know I have hated all the fuss here, and our never being allowed to

speak a word to one another. But what could I do?" She shrugged her

shoulders.

Then Queenie had really cared all the time!

Alex in that moment was compensated for all the tears and storms and

disgraces of the year. That afternoon spent under the thick, leafy

boughs of the old apple-trees with Queenie, enabled Alex to face with

some degree of courage the prospect of their approaching separation. She

knew that any sign of unhappiness for such a reason would be imputed to

her as wrong-doing by the authorities, and as unnatural and heartless

indifference to home on the part of her companions.

So Alex, who had no trust in any standards of her own, was ashamed of

the tears which she nightly stifled in her hard pillow, and felt them to

be one more of those degrading weaknesses with which her Creator had

malignantly endowed her in order that she might be as a pariah among her

fellows.

She felt no resentment, only blind wonder and fatalistic apathy.

Nevertheless, all through Alex' childhood and early girlhood, unhappy

though she was, there dwelt within her a curious certainty that,

somewhere, happiness awaited her, which she, and she alone, would have

full capacity to appreciate.

Side by side with that, was her intense capacity for suffering, but that

she was learning to think of as only a cruel, tearing affliction

despised alike by God and man.

Of the immense force latent in the power of intense feeling Alex knew

nothing, nor did any of the teaching which she received vouchsafe to her

any illumination.

She and Queenie and the three Munroe girls made the journey to England

with Madame Hippolyte, who showed Alex a marked kindness not usual with

her.

At fifteen, wakeful nights and storms of crying leave their traces, and

Alex, pale-faced and with encircled eyes, was pitiful in her

propitiatory attempts to join in the eager anticipations of holiday

enjoyment exchanged between her companions.

Perhaps, thought the French nun, the little black sheep had not a very

happy home. A bad report would follow Alex to England she well knew, and

it might be that the poor child was dreading its results.

Her manner to Alex grew gentle and compassionate, and Alex noticed it

with a relieved, uncomprehending gratitude that held something abject in

its surprised, almost incredulous acceptance of any kindness.

Madame Hippolyte, though she sternly rebuked herself for the

uncharitable impulse, felt a certain contempt of the way in which her

advances were received.

She knew nothing of the self-assertive, arrogant manner that would

presently revive, in the childish sense of security in home

surroundings, and would yet be merely another manifestation of the

unbalanced complexity that was Alex Clare.

But as the crossing came to an end and they found themselves in the

train speeding towards London, Alex was silent, her small face white and

her eyes tragical.

The American girls made delighted use of the strip of looking-glass in

the carriage, and exchanged predictions as to the pleased amazement that

would be caused by Sadie's growth, the length of Marie's plait of red

hair, and Diana's added inches of skirt.

Queenie Torrance only glanced at her reflection once or twice, though an

acute observer might have seen that she was not indifferent to the

advantage of facing a looking-glass, after the many weeks in which none

had been available. But she was merely completely serene in the

immutability of her own attractiveness. Queenie did not need to depend

upon her looks, which seldom or never varied from soft, colourless

opacity and opulence of contour. The pale, heavy rings of her fair hair

always fell back in the same way from her open, rounded forehead, her

well-modelled hands, with fingers broad at the base, and pointed,

gleaming nails were always cool and white.

The Americans were all three pretty girls, and something of race that

showed in Alex' bearing and gestures made her remarkable amongst any

assembly of children, but it was at Queenie that every man who passed

the little group in the railway carriage glanced a second time.

Good Madame Hippolyte, as serenely unaware of this as only a woman whose

life had been passed in a religious Order could be, regarded Queenie as

by far the least of the responsibilities on her hands, and did not

conceal her satisfaction when Marie and Sadie and Diana were immediately

claimed at the terminus by a group of excited, noisy cousins, and

hurried away to an enormous waiting carriage-and-pair.

"Et vous?" she demanded, turning to the other two.

"Dad'll come for me," said Queenie confidently, inadvertently uttering a

nickname that would not have been permitted to the Clare children, and

was, in fact, never in those days heard in the class of society to which

they belonged.

Queenie shot an imperceptible glance of confusion at Alex, who was

clinging speechlessly to her hand.

Next moment she had recovered herself.

"There's my father!" she cried.

Colonel Torrance was making his way rapidly towards them, a tall,

soldierly-looking man, a trifle too conspicuously well groomed, a trifle

too upright in his bearing, a trifle too remarkable altogether, with

very black moustache and eyebrows and very white hair.

He raised his tall white hat with its black band, at the sight of his

daughter, expanded his white waistcoat and grey frock-coat with the

_malmaison_ buttonhole yet further, and whipped off his pale grey glove

to take the limp hand extended to him by Alex, as Queenie

self-possessedly introduced her.

Alex hardly heard Colonel Torrance's elaborately courteous allusion to

Sir Francis Clare, whom he had had the pleasure of seeing several times

at the Club, but she wondered eagerly if that introduction would be

considered sufficient to allow of her inviting Queenie to Clevedon

Square.

She felt as though her spirit were being torn from her body when Queenie

said, "Good-bye, Alex, dear. Mind you write. _Au revoir, ma mère_."

Compliments were exchanged between Madame Hippolyte and Queenie's

father, the gentleman flourished his top hat again, and then said to his

daughter:

"My dear, I have a hansom waiting; the impudent fellow says his horse

won't stand. I trust you have no large amount of luggage."

Queenie shook her head, smiling slightly, and in a moment, the brevity

of which seemed incredible to Alex and left her with an instant's

absolute suspension of physical faculties, they disappeared among the

crowd.

Madame Hippolyte grasped the arm of her distraught-looking pupil.

"But rouse yourself, Alex!" she said vigorously. "Who is to come for

you?"

"The carriage," muttered Alex automatically, well aware that neither

would Lady Isabel sacrifice an hour of her afternoon to waiting at a

crowded London station in July, nor old Nurse permit the other children

to do so, had they wished it.

"And where is it, this carriage?" sceptically demanded Madame Hippolyte,

harassed and exhausted, and aware that she had yet to find a

four-wheeled cab of sufficiently cleanly and sober appearance to satisfy

her, in which she might proceed herself to the convent branch-house in

the east of London. But presently Alex came partially out of her dream

and pointed out the brougham and bay horse and the footman in buff

livery at the door.

"But you will not drive alone--in this _quartier_?" cried the nun, in

horrified protest at this exhibition of English want of propriety.

Her fears proved groundless.

The neat, black-bonneted head of a maid appeared at the brougham window,

and with a sigh of infinite relief Madame Hippolyte bade farewell to the

last and most anxiously regarded of her charges.

"How you've grown, Miss Alex!" cried the maid, but her tone was scarcely

one of admiration, as she gazed at the stooping shoulders and pale,

travel-stained face under the ugly sailor hat of dark blue straw. "We

shall have to make you look like yourself, with some of your own

clothes, before your mamma sees you," she added kindly.

Alex scarcely answered, and sat squeezing her hands together.

She knew she must come out of this dream of misery that seemed to

envelop her, and which was so naughty and undutiful. Of course it was

unnatural not to be glad to come home again, and it wasn't as though she

had been so very happy at Liège.

It was only Queenie.

No one must know, or she would certainly be blamed and ridiculed for her

foolish and headlong fancy.

Alex wondered dimly why she was so constituted as to differ from every

one else.

The cab turned into Clevedon Square. Alex looked out of the window.

The big square bore already the look of desertion most associated in her

mind with summer in London. Shutters and blinds obscured the windows of

the first and second floors of many houses, and against one of the

corner houses a ladder was propped and an unwontedly dazzling

cream-colour proclaimed fresh paint.

Some of the houses showed striped sun-blinds, and window-boxes of

scarlet geraniums. Alex saw that there were flowers in their own balcony

as well as an awning.

When the carriage drew up at the front door, she jumped out and replied

hastily to the man-servant's respectful greeting, a slight feeling of

excitement possessing her for the first time at the prospect of seeing

Barbara, and impressing her with her added inches of height.

She ran quickly up the stairs, hoping that Lady Isabel would not chance

to come out of the drawing-room as she went past. On the second landing,

safely past the double door of the drawing-room, she paused a moment to

take breath, and heard a subdued call from overhead.

Barbara was hanging over the banisters with Archie.

"Hallo, Alex!"

Alex went up to the schoolroom landing, and she and Barbara looked

curiously at one another, before exchanging a perfunctory kiss.

Alex suddenly felt grubby and rather shabby in her old last year's serge

frock, which had been considered good enough for the journey, when she

saw Barbara in her clean white muslin, with a very pale blue sash, and

her hair tied up with a big pale blue bow.

Barbara's hair had grown, which annoyed Alex. It fell into one long,

pale curl down her back, and no longer provoked a contrast with Alex'

superior length of shining wave. Deprived of the supervision of Nurse,

with her iron insistence on "fifty strokes of the brush every night, and

Rowland's Macassor on Saturdays," Alex' hair had somehow lost its shine,

and hung limply in a tangled, uneven pigtail.

Alex thought that Barbara eyed her in a rather superior way.

She felt much more enthusiastic in greeting little Archie. He was

prettier and pinker and more engaging than ever, and Alex felt glad that

he had not yet been sent to school, to have his fair curls cropped, and

his little velvet suit exchanged for cricketing flannels.

He pulled Alex into the schoolroom, with the enthusiasm for a new face

characteristic of a child to whom shyness is unknown, and Alex received

the curt, all-observant greeting which she had learnt to know would

always await her from old Nurse.

"So you are back from your foreign parts, are you, Miss Alex?"

Nurse always said "Miss Alex" when addressing her returned charge at

first, and as invariably relapsed into her old peremptory form of

address before the end of the evening.

"My sakes, child, what have they been doing to you? You look like a

scarecrow."

"Has she grown?" asked Barbara jealously. She knew that grown-up people

were always, for some mysterious reason, pleased when one had "grown."

"Grown! Yes, and got her back bent like a bow," said Nurse vigorously.

"An hour on the backboard's what you'll do every day, and bed at seven

o'clock tonight. Have they been giving you enough to eat?"

"Of course," said Alex, tossing her head.

She did not like the convent when she was there, but a contradictory

instinct always made her when at home uphold it violently, as a

privileged spot to which she alone had access.

"You look half-starved, to me," Nurse said unbelievingly.

Nothing would ever have persuaded her of what was, in fact, the truth,

that Alex received more abundant, more wholesome, and infinitely better

cooked food in Belgium than in London.

Barbara sat on the end of the sofa, swinging her legs and fidgetting

with the tassel of the blind-cord.

"Have you brought back any prizes, Alex?" she enquired negligently.

And Alex replied with an equal air of indifference:

"One for composition, and I've got a certificate of proficiency for

music."

This was not at all the way in which she had planned to make her

announcements. She had thought that her prizes would impress Barbara

very much, and she had foreseen a sort of small ceremony of display when

she would bring out the big red-and-gilt book. But Barbara only nodded,

and presently said:

"Cedric has got quantities of prizes: the headmaster wrote and told

father that he was a 'boy of marked abilities and remarkable power of

concentration,' and father is going to give him a whole sovereign, but

that's because he made his century."

"When will he be here?"

"Next week. His holidays begin on Tuesday and he's got a whole fortnight

longer than we have."

"We?" asked Alex coldly. "How can _you_ have holidays? You're not at

school."

"I have lessons," cried Barbara angrily. "You know I have, and

Ma'moiselle is going to give me a prize for writing, and a prize for

history, and a prize for application. So there!"

"Prizes!" said Alex scornfully. "When you're all by yourself! I never

heard such nonsense."

She no longer felt wretched and subdued, but full of irritation at

Barbara's conceit and absorption in herself.

"It's not nonsense!"

"It is. If you'd been at school you'd know it was."

"One word more of this and you'll go to bed, the pair of you," declared

old Nurse, the autocrat whom Alex had for the moment forgotten. "It's

argle-bargle the minute you set foot in the place, Miss Alex. Now you

just come along and be made fit to be seen before your poor mamma and

papa set eyes on you looking like a charity-school child, as hasn't seen

a brush or a bit of soap for a month of Sundays."

Useless to protest even at this trenchant description of herself.

Useless to attempt resistance during the long process of undressing,

dressing again, brushing and combing, inspection of finger-nails and

general, dissatisfied scrutiny that ensued. Alex, in a stiff, clean

frock, the counterpart, to her secret vexation, of Barbara's, open-work

stockings, and new shoes that hurt her feet, was enjoined "to hold back

her shoulders and not poke" and dispatched to the drawing-room with

Barbara and Archie as soon as the schoolroom tea was over.

She felt as though she had never been away.

No one had asked her anything about the convent, and all through tea

Barbara and Archie had talked about the coming holidays, or had made

allusions to events of which Alex knew nothing, but which had evidently

been absorbing their attention for the last few weeks.

They seemed to Alex futile in the extreme.

Downstairs, Lady Isabel kissed her, and said, "Well, my darling, I'm

very glad to have you at home again. Have you been a good girl this

term, and brought back a report that will please papa?" and then had

turned to speak to some one without waiting for an answer.

Alex sat beside her mother while she talked to the one remaining

visitor, and felt discontented and awkward.

Barbara and Archie were looking at pictures together in the corner of

the room, very quiet and well behaved. The caller stayed late, and just

as she had gone Sir Francis came in from his Club, the faint, familiar

smell of tobacco, and Russia leather, and expensive eau-de-Cologne that

seemed to pervade him, striking Alex with a fresh sense of recognition

as she rose to receive his kiss. He greeted her very kindly, but Alex

was quite aware of a dissatisfaction as intense as, though less

outspoken than, that of old Nurse as he put up his double eye-glasses

and gazed at his eldest daughter.

"We must see if the country or the seaside will bring back some roses to

your cheeks," he said in characteristic phraseology.

But when the children were dismissed from the drawing-room, Sir Francis

straightened his own broad back, and tapped Alex' rounded

shoulder-blades.

"Hold yourself up, my child," he said very decidedly. "I want to see a

nice flat, and straight back."

He made no other criticism, and none was needed.

Alex had gauged the extent of his dismay.

IV

Holidays

"Mother, may I ask Queenie Torrance to tea?"

Alex had rehearsed the words so often to herself that they had almost

become meaningless.

Her heart beat thickly with the anticipation of a refusal, when at last

she found courage and opportunity to utter the little stilted phrase,

with a tongue that felt dry and in a voice that broke nervously in her

throat.

"What do you say, darling?" absently inquired Lady Isabel; and Alex had

to say it again.

"Queenie Torrance?" said Lady Isabel, still vaguely.

"Mother, you remember--I told you about her. She is the only other

English girl besides me at the convent, and she knows all about father

and you and everything, and her father belongs to the same Club--"

Snobbishness was not in Alex' composition, but she adopted her mother's

standards eagerly and instinctively, in the hope of gaining her point.

"But, my darling, what are you talkin' about? You know mother doesn't

let you have little girls here unless she knows somethin' about them.

Give me the little diamond brooch, Alex; the one in the silver box

there."

Lady Isabel, absorbed in the completion of her evening toilette,

remained unconscious of the havoc she had wrought. Alex felt rather

sick.

The intensity of feeling to which she was a victim, for the most part

reacted on her physically, though she was as unconscious of this as was

her mother.

But with the cunning borne of urgent desire, Alex knew that persistence,

which with Sir Francis would invariably win a courteous rebuke and an

immutable refusal, could sometimes bring forth rather querulous

concession from Lady Isabel's weakness.

"But, mummy, darling, I do want Queenie to come here and see Barbara and

Cedric."

It was not true, but Alex was using the arguments which she felt would

be most likely to appeal to her mother.

"She wants to know them so much, and--and I saw her father at the

station when we arrived, and he was very polite."

"Who was with you? I don't like your speakin' like that to people whom

father and I don't know."

"Oh, it was only a second," said Alex hastily. "Madame Hippolyte was

there, and Colonel Torrance just came up to take Queenie away."

"Torrance--Torrance?" said Lady Isabel reflectively. "Who's Torrance?"

The question made Alex' heart sink afresh. It was one which, coming from

her parents, she heard applied to new acquaintances, or occasionally to

protégés for whom some intimate friends might crave the favour of an

invitation to one of the big Clare "crushes" during the season, and the

inquiry was seldom one which boded well for the regard in which the

newcomer would be held.

"Mother, you'd like her, I think, really and truly you would. She's

awfully pretty."

"Alex!"

Lady Isabel for once sounded really angry.

"I'm so sorry; it slipped out--I didn't mean it--I never really say it.

I never _do_, mother."

Alex became agitated, trying to fend off the accusation which she

foresaw was coming.

"I suppose you learn those horrid slang words from this girl you've

taken such a violent fancy to."

"No, no."

"Well, darling, both father and I are very much disgusted with some of

the tricks you've picked up at the convent, and you'll have to find some

way of curin' yourself before you put up your hair and come out. As for

the way you're holdin' yourself, I'm simply shocked at it, and so is

your father; I shall see about sendin' you to MacPherson's gymnasium for

proper exercises as soon as you get back from the country."

Lady Isabel gazed with dissatisfaction at her daughter.

"You mustn't be a disappointment to us, darling," she said. "You know

you'll be coming out in another two years' time, and it's so

important--"

She broke off, eyeing Alex anxiously. Already she had forgotten the

question of the invitation to Queenie Torrance. Alex, in an agony,

rushed recklessly at her point.

"But, mother, you haven't said yet--may I ask Queenie on Saturday? You

know we shan't be here after Saturday. May I?"

Lady Isabel moved to the door with more annoyance than she often

displayed.

"My dear child, you're old enough to know that these things aren't done,

and besides, I've already said no. Father and I dislike these sudden,

violent friendships, in any case. Run along upstairs, my darling, and if

you and Barbara want a little tea-party on Saturday, you may ask those

nice Fitzgerald children. Tell Nurse that I said you might."

Lady Isabel kissed Alex, and went downstairs, the trailing folds of her

evening dress carefully held up in one hand as she descended the broad,

curving stairs.

From the upper landing Alex watched her for a few moments, her face

burning with mortification and the effort to restrain her tears. Then

she broke into sobs and ran away upstairs.

Mother had not understood in the very least. She never understood, never

would understand.

No one understood.

Alex felt, as so often, that she would barter everything she possessed

for the finding of some one who would understand.

In her craving for self-expression, she talked to Barbara about Queenie

Torrance, but represented their intercourse as that of an equal

friendship, with unbounded affection and confidence on both sides.

Barbara listened believingly enough, and even exhibited signs of a faint

jealousy, and gradually Alex' inventions brought her a slight feeling of

comfort, as though the ideal friendship which she so readily described

to her little sister must have some real existence.

The old sense of supremacy began to assert itself again, and Barbara

fell into the old ways of following Alex' lead in everything. She lost

her shrinking convent manner, born of the sense of helpless insecurity,

and when Cedric's return brought Barbara back to her earliest

allegiance--the league which she and Cedric had always formed against

Alex' overbearing ways in the nursery--her defection was resented by her

sister with no lack of spirit.

"Idiotic little copy-cat! Just because Cedric's come, you pretend you

only care for cricket and nonsense like that, as though he wanted to

play cricket with a little girl like you."

"He doesn't mind playing cricket with me; he says I can bowl very well

for a girl, and it gives him practice. Anyway," said Barbara shrewdly,

"he likes talking about it, and how am I to be his pal unless I

understand what he means?"

"You're not to say that horrid, vulgar word. You know mother would be

very angry."

"I shall say what I like. It's not your business. You're a prig, ever

since you went to that hateful convent!"

"You're not to speak to me like that, you're not!" shouted Alex,

stamping her foot.

The dispute degenerated into one of the furious quarrels of their

nursery days, and Alex, completely mastered by her temper, flew at

Barbara, as she had not done since they were seven and ten years old

respectively, and hit her and pulled her long curl viciously.

Barbara stood stock-still on the instant. She had infinitely more

self-control than Alex, and a strong instinct for being invariably in

the right.

But she uttered shriek upon piercing shriek that brought old Nurse,

heavy-footed but astonishingly swift, upon the scene, and reduced Alex

to dire disgrace for the rest of the day.

She cried again, suffering remorse and shame that seemed almost

unbearable, and told herself hopelessly that she could never be good

anywhere.

"Such an example to your little sister, who's never given me a moment's

trouble all the while you've been away," Nurse declared, at the end of a

long monologue during which Alex learnt and implicitly believed that a

temper like hers, unbridled at the age of fifteen, must have irrevocably

passed beyond one's own control into that of the Devil himself.

"When you remember," Nurse wound up, "how you nearly killed her with

your naughty ways and had her on her back for a year, and she with never

a word of complaint against you, poor lamb, one would think you'd want

to make it up to her, instead of hitting one as never even hits you

back. But you've no heart, Alex, as I've always said and always shall

say about you."

Heart or no heart, old Nurse thoroughly succeeded in working upon Alex'

feelings, and in sobbing abjection she begged Barbara's forgiveness.

Barbara, agreeably conscious of martyrdom, found it easy to grant, with

a gentleness that redoubled Alex' shame, and the incident, except for

Alex' swollen eyes and subdued tones next day, was closed. Cedric,

characteristically, remained oblivious of it throughout.

He had grown into a good-looking boy, not tall for his eleven years, but

sturdy and well set up, with steady, straight-gazing eyes behind the

spectacles that his short sight still necessitated, to the grief of Lady

Isabel. His mind was obsessed by cricket, and from his conversation one

might have deduced that no other occupation had filled the summer term.

Nevertheless, he brought home a large pile of prizes, and a report that

caused Sir Francis to smile his excessively rare smile and utter two

words that Cedric never forgot, and never mentioned to any one else:

"Well done."

Two days after Cedric's return, Sir Francis and Lady Isabel went away

for their annual round of country visits, and old Nurse, with the new,

young nurse who devoted her services exclusively to Pamela, and a

nursery-maid to wait upon them, went with the children to stay at

Fiveapples Farm in Devonshire.

The farm was glorious.

The girls might run about the hay-fields and in the lanes, though Nurse,

mindful of Lady Isabel's injunction as to complexion and the danger of

freckles, always insisted on hats and gloves; and Cedric, followed

everywhere like a little shadow by Archie, rode the farm horses and even

went into Exeter to market with Farmer Young on Fridays.

Alex insensibly began to cease her preoccupied outlook for letters from

Queenie, and the convent life began to relax its hold on her memory and

imagination, as older influences resumed their sway.

Correspondence with Queenie had never been satisfactory.

Although not forbidden, Alex knew that it was considered a foolish and

undesirable practice, and that her letters, although, as a matter of

fact, generally given to her unopened, were always liable to supervision

by the authorities as a matter of course.

Old Nurse might be unable to read, although no one had ever heard her

admit as much, but she always slit open any letter that came for Alex or

Barbara and made a feint of perusing it; unless the envelope, as rarely

happened, bore Lady Isabel's superscription.

"In the absence of your mamma," said old Nurse severely, and she never

failed to refuse unhesitatingly any request from Alex to be allowed to

go to the post office for the purpose of buying stamps.

Queenie had only written twice. The second letter reached Alex at

Fiveapples Farm, when she had nearly given up hope for it.

"DEAR ALEX,

"Thank you very much for your letters. It is nice of you to write

to me so often. Please forgive me for not writing oftener to you,

but I haven't got much time. It's so hot in London now. You are

very lucky to be in the country. I think we shall go soon, but I

don't know yet where we shall go.

"Do you know that you are quite near where the Munroes are staying?

Diana wrote to me the other day. Perhaps you will see them. Please

give them my love. Do you remember how funny Diana was at her

singing lessons? I often think of the convent, don't you? Now I

must end, Alex, with fond love from your affectionate school

friend,

"QUEENIE.

"P.S. I am not going back next term. I am very glad, except for not

seeing you. I hope we shall see each other in London."

Alex read and re-read the postscript, and tried not to think that the

rest of the letter was disappointing.

"Your great friend doesn't write you nearly such long letters as you

write her," observed Barbara, eyeing the four small sheets which

Queenie's unformed, curiously immature-looking writing had barely

succeeded in covering.

"She hasn't got time," said Alex quickly and defensively.

"More like she's got a sensible governess who doesn't let her waste good

pen and paper on such rubbish," old Nurse severely pointed the moral.

"What do girls want to write to one another for?" said Cedric. "They

can't have anything to say."

Barbara, who was secretly curious, seized the opportunity.

"What does she write about, Alex?"

Alex would have liked to tell them to mind their own business, but she

knew that any accusation of making mysteries would bring down Nurse's

wrath upon her, and as likely as not the confiscation of the letter.

She read it aloud hastily, with a pretence of skipping here and there,

leaving out the "dear Alex" at the beginning, and the whole of the last

sentence and the postscript.

"I suppose you've left out all the darlings and the loves and kisses,"

Cedric remarked scornfully, more from conventionality than anything

else.

Alex was not averse to having it supposed that Queenie had been more

lavish with endearments than she had in reality shown herself.

"Who are the Munroes?" asked Barbara. "Are they nice?"

"The American girls who crossed from Liège with me. I remember now, they

were going to spend their holidays with an aunt somewhere in

Devonshire."

"Perhaps we shall see them. How old are they?"

"Sadie and Diana are much older than you," Alex told her crushingly. "In

fact, they're older than I am. But the little one, Marie, is only

twelve."

"Where does the aunt live?"

"How should I know?" said Alex. She reflected bitterly that even if her

schoolmates should ever meet her in Devonshire, it would be impossible

for her to make any advance to them, with old Nurse, even more strictly

mindful of the conventions than Lady Isabel.

But for once it seemed as though fate were on Alex' side.

"I hear," wrote Lady Isabel, in one of her hasty, collective letters,

addressed impartially to "My darling Children," "that Mrs. Alfred

Cardew, who lives at a very pretty house called Trevose, not more than a

few miles from where you are, has her three little nieces with her for

the holidays, and that they are at the same convent as Alex. So if you

like, darlings, as I know Mrs. Alfred Cardew quite well, you may ask

Nurse to let you arrange some little picnic or other and invite the

three children."

Alex, taken by surprise, felt doubtful. She did not know whether she

wanted to expose herself to the criticisms which she thought,

disparagingly gazing round at her brothers and sisters and their

autocratic guardian, they would inevitably call forth from strangers.

Suppose they came, and Barbara was shy and foolish, and Cedric doggedly

bored, and then the Munroes went back to Liège next term and laughed at

Alex, and told the other girls what queer relations she had. And again,

thought Alex, Nurse would probably think the Americanisms, which had

amused Queenie and Alex at the convent, merely vulgar, and Barbara and

Cedric would wonder.

"You _are_ extraordinary, Alex!" said Barbara petulantly. "You're always

talking about your friends at the convent and saying how nice they are,

and then when there's a chance of our seeing them too, you don't seem to

want to have them."

"Yes, I do," said Alex hastily, and consoled herself with the reflection

that very likely the plan would never materialize.

But as luck would have it, Alex, the very next day, saw Sadie Munroe

waving to her excitedly from the carriage where she was driving with a

very gaily-dressed lady, obviously the aunt.

The following week, a charming note invited Alex, Barbara, Cedric and

Archie to lunch and spend the afternoon at Trevose. They should be

fetched in the pony-cart, and driven back after tea.

At least, Alex reflected thankfully, old Nurse would not be there to put

her to shame.

About Archie, with his clean sailor suit and shining curls, she felt no

anxiety. He was always a success.

But she inspected Cedric, and especially Barbara, with anxiety.

The day was a very hot one, and Cedric in cricketing flannels looked

sufficiently like every other boy of his age and standing to reassure

his critical sister.

But Barbara!

Surely the three pretty, sharp-eyed Americans would despise little,

pale, plain Barbara, with her one ridiculous curl of pale hair, and the

big, babyish bow of blue ribbon against which Alex had protested so

vigorously in her own case that Nurse had finally substituted black.

No amount of protest, however, even had Alex dared to offer it, would

have induced Nurse to depart from the rule which decreed that the

sisters should be dressed alike, and Barbara's clean cotton frock was

the counterpart of Alex'.

Alex thought the similarity ridiculous, and hated the twin Leghorn hats,

each with a precisely similar wreath round the crown, of thick, pale

blue forget-me-nots, of which the clusters were unrelieved by any blade

or hint of green.

Even their brown shoes and stockings and brown gauntlet gloves were

alike.

Alex felt disgusted at the aspect which she thought they must present,

and was unable to enjoy the four-mile drive in the pony-cart Mrs. Cardew

had sent over for them. She could not have told whether she was more

apprehensive of the effect Barbara and Cedric might have on the Munroes,

or the Munroes on Barbara and Cedric.

"What do you suppose we shall do all the afternoon?" asked Barbara. She

was in one of her rare moods of excitement, and her futile chattering

and unceasing questions filled Alex with impatience.

The two were on the verge of a quarrel by the time the last hill was

reached.