PART I



CHAPTER I

"Well, now we've done all we can, and all I mean to do," said Alice
Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. "Everything's perfectly
comfortable, and if she doesn't like it, we can't help it. I don't know
why we make such a fuss."

The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated
basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring day, and the windows
of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were open
to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just coming
into blossom. Through their twinkling buds and interlacing branches
could be seen grey college walls--part of the famous garden front of St.
Cyprian's College, Oxford. There seemed to be a slight bluish mist over
the garden and the building, a mist starred with patches of white and
dazzlingly green leaf. And, above all, there was an evening sky,
peaceful and luminous, from which a light wind blew towards the two
girls sitting by the open window. One, the elder, had a face like a
Watteau sketch, with black velvety eyes, hair drawn back from a white
forehead, delicate little mouth, with sharp indentations at the corners,
and a small chin. The other was much more solidly built--a girl of
seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an intelligent eye would have
read as not likely to last; a complexion of red and brown tanned by