Connie had no sooner settled herself on the small sofa she had managed to fit into her room than she sprang up again.

“Stupid!—­where are those letters!” She rummaged in various drawers and bags, hit upon what she wanted, after an impetuous hunt, and returned to the fire.

“Do you know I think Mr. Pryce has a good chance of that post?  I got this to-day.”

She held out a letter, smiling.  Alice flushed and took it.  It was from Lord Glaramara, and it concerned that same post in the Conservative Central Office on which Herbert Pryce had had his eyes for some time.  The man holding it had been “going” for months, but was now, at last, gone.  The post was vacant, and Connie, who had a pretty natural turn for wire-pulling, fostered by her Italian bringing up, had been trying her hand, both with the Chancellor and her Uncle Langmoor.

“You little intriguer!” wrote Lord Glaramara—­“I will do what I can.  Your man sounds very suitable.  If he isn’t, I can tell you plainly he won’t get the post.  Neither political party can afford to employ fools just now.  But if he is what you say—­well, we shall see!  Send him up to see me, at the House of Lords, almost any evening next week.  He’ll have to take his chance, of course, of finding me free.  If I cotton to him, I’ll send him on to somebody else.  And—­don’t talk about it! Your letter was just like your mother.  She had an art of doing these things!”

Alice read and reread the note.  When she looked up from it, it was with a rather flustered face.

“Awfully good of you, Connie!  May I show it—­to Mr. Pryce?”

“Yes—­but get it back.  Tell him to write to Lord Glaramara to-morrow.  Well, now then”—­Connie discovered and lit a cigarette, the sight of which stirred in Alice a kind of fascinated disapproval,—­“now then, tell me what’s the matter!—­why Uncle Ewen looks as if he hadn’t had a day’s rest since last term, and Nora’s so glum—­and why he and she go sitting up at night together when they ought to be in their beds?”

Connie’s little woman-of-the-world air—­very evident in this speech—­which had always provoked Alice in their earlier acquaintance, passed now unnoticed.  Miss Hooper sat perplexed and hesitating, staring into the fire.  But with that note in her pocket, Alice felt herself at once in a new and detached position towards her family.

“It’s money, of course,” she said at last, her white brow puckering.  “It’s not only bills—­they’re dreadfully worrying!—­we seem never to get free from them, but it’s something else—­something quite new—­which has only happened, lately.  There is an old loan from the bank that has been going on for years.  Father had almost forgotten it, and now they’re pressing him.  It’s dreadful.  They know we’re so hard up.”

Connie in her turn looked perplexed.  It was always difficult for her to realise financial trouble on a small scale.  Ruin on the Falloden scale was intelligible to one who had heard much talk of the bankruptcies of some of the great Roman families.  But the carking care that may come from lack of a few hundred pounds, this the Risboroughs’ daughter had to learn; and she put her mind to it eagerly.