Womanly reasoning, most unlike “woman’s reasons!” She brought, with unaffected alacrity, a collection of tafroo-slips whose addresses bore out her account of their character.  Taking the last from the bundle, I bade her erase its contents.

“No,” she said, “that is the one I least liked to show.  If you will not read it, please follow my hand as I read, and see for yourself how far I have misused your trust.”

“I never doubted your good faith, Eunane”—­But she had begun to read, pointing with her finger as she went on.  At one sentence hand and voice wavered a little without apparent reason.  “I shall,” wrote her school-friend, some half year her junior, “make my appearance at the next inspection.  I wish the Campta, had left you here till now; we might perhaps have contrived to pass into the same household.”

“A very innocent wish, and very natural,” I said, in answer to the look, half inquiring, half shy, with which Eunane watched the effect of her words.  I could not now use the precaution in her case, which it had somehow seemed natural to adopt with Eive, of marking the paper returned for erasure.  On her part, Eunane thrust into my hand the whole bundle as they were, and I was forced myself to erase, by an electro-chemical process which leaves no trace of writing, the words of that selected.  The absence of any mark on the second paper served sufficiently to distinguish the two when, of course without stating from whom I received them, I placed, them in Davilo’s hands.

When we were ready to leave the peristyle for the carriage, I observed that Eunane alone was still unveiled, while the others wore their cloaks of down and the thick veils, without which no lady may present herself to the public eye.

“‘Thieving time is woman’s crime,’” I said, quoting a domestic proverb.  “In another household you would; be left behind.”

“Of course,” she replied, such summary discipline seeming to her as appropriate as to an European child.  “I don’t like always to deserve the vine and receive the nuts.”

“You must take which I like,” I retorted, laughing.  Satisfied or silenced, she hastened to dress, and enjoyed with unalloyed delight the unusual pleasure of inspecting dresses and jewellery, and making more purchases in a day than she had expected to be able to do in two years.  But she and her companions acted with more consideration than ladies permitted to visit the shops of Europe show for their masculine escort.  Eive alone, on this as on other occasions, availed herself thoroughly of those privileges of childhood which I had always extended to her.

So quick are the proceedings and so excellent the arrangements of Martial commerce, even where ladies are concerned, that a couple of hours saw us on our way homeward, after having passed through the apartments of half the merchants in Altasfe.  Purposely for my own pleasure, as well as for that of my companions, I took a circuitous route homeward, and in so doing came within sight of a principal feminine Nursery or girls’ school.  Recognising it, Eunane spoke with some eagerness—­