“It’s ridiculous!—­preposterous!  They’ll clash all day long.”

Connie replied with difficulty, as though she had so pondered and discussed this matter with herself that every opinion about it seemed equally reasonable.

“I don’t think so.  Otto wishes it.”

“But why—­but why?” insisted Nora.  “Oh, Connie!—­as if Douglas Falloden could look after anybody but himself!”

Then she repented a little.  Connie smiled, rather coldly.

“He looked after his father,” she said quietly.  “I told you all that in my letters.  And you forget how it was—­that he and Otto came across each other again.”

Nora warmly declared that she had not forgotten it, but that it did not seem to her to have anything to do with the extraordinary proposal that the man more responsible than any one else for the maiming—­possibly for the death—­of Otto Radowitz, if all one heard about him were true, should be now installed as his companion and guardian during these critical months.

She talked with obvious and rather angry common sense, as one who had not passed her eighteenth birthday for nothing.

But Connie fell silent.  She would not discuss it, and Nora was obliged to let the subject drop.

* * * * *

Mrs. Hooper, whose pinched face had grown visibly older, received her husband’s niece with an evident wish to be kind.  Alice, too, was almost affectionate, and Uncle Ewen came hurrying out of his study to greet her.  But Connie had not been an hour in the house before she had perceived that everybody in it was preoccupied and unhappy; unless, indeed, it were Alice, who had evidently private thoughts of her own, which, to a certain extent, released her from the family worries.

What was the matter?  She was determined to know.

It happened that she and Alice went up to bed together.  Nora had been closeted with her father in the little schoolroom on the ground floor, since nine o’clock, and when Connie proposed to look in and wish them good night, Alice said uncomfortably—­

“Better not.  They’re—­they’re very busy.”

Connie ruminated.  At the top of the stairs, she turned—­

“Look here—­do come in to me, and have a talk!”

Alice agreed, after a moment’s hesitation.  There had never been any beginnings of intimacy between her and Connie, and she took Connie’s advance awkwardly.

The two girls were however soon seated in Connie’s room, where a blazing fire defied the sudden cold of a raw and bleak October.  The light danced on Alice’s beady black eyes, and arched brows, on her thin but very red lips, on the bright patch of colour in each cheek.  She was more than ever like a Watteau sketch in black chalk, heightened with red, and the dress she wore, cut after the pattern of an eighteenth-century sacque, according to an Oxford fashion of that day, fell in admirably with the natural effect.  Connie had very soon taken off her tea-gown, loosened and shaken out her hair, and put on a white garment in which she felt at ease.  Alice noticed, as Nora had done, that Connie was fast becoming a beauty; but whether the indisputable fact was to be welcomed or resented had still to be decided.