He wavered.

“You dear child!” There was a silence.  Then he resumed—­as though feeling his way—­

“It occurs to me that I might consult Sorell.  If he thought it right—­if we could protect you from loss—!”

Connie sprang at him and kissed him in delight.

“Of course!—­that’ll do splendidly!  Mr. Sorell will see, at once, it’s the right thing for me, and my happiness.  I can’t be turned out—­I really can’t!  So it’s settled.  Yes—­it’s settled!—­or it will be directly—­and nobody need bother any more—­need they?  But—­there’s one condition.”

Ewen Hooper looked at her in silence.

“That you—­you and Nora—­go to Borne this Christmas time, this very Christmas, Uncle Ewen!  I think I put in enough—­and I can give you such a lot of letters!”

She laughed joyously, though she was very near crying.

“I have never been able to go to Home—­Or Athens—­never!” he said, in a low voice, as he sat down again at his table.  All the thwarted hopes, all the sordid cares of years were in the quiet words.

“Well, now you’re going!” said Connie shyly.  “Oh, that would be ripping!  You’ll promise me that—­you must, please!”

Silence again.  She approached Nora, timidly.

“Nora!”

Nora rose.  Her face was stained with tears.

“It’s all wrong,” she said heavily—­“it’s all wrong.  But—­I give in.  What I said was a lie.  There is nothing else in the world that we could possibly do.”

And she rushed out of the room without another word.  Connie looked wistfully after her.  Nora’s pain in receiving had stirred in her the shame-faced distress in giving that lives in generous souls.  “Why should I have more than they?”

She stole out after Nora.  Ewen Hooper was left staring at the letter from his bankers, and trying to collect his thoughts.  Connie’s voice was still in his ears.  It had all the sweetness of his dead sister’s.

* * * * *

Connie was reading in her room before dinner.  She had shut herself up there, feeling rather battered by the emotions of the afternoon, when she heard a knock that she knew was Nora’s.

“Come in!”

Nora appeared.  She had had her storm of weeping in private and got over it.  She was now quite composed, but the depression, the humiliation even, expressed in her whole bearing dismayed Connie afresh.

Nora took a seat on the other side of the fire.  Connie eyed her uneasily.

“Are you ever going to forgive me, Nora?” she said, at last.

Nora shrugged her shoulders.

“You couldn’t help it.  I see that.”

“Thank you,” said Connie meekly.

“But what I can’t forgive is that you never said a word—­”

“To you?  That you might undo it all?  Nora, you really are an absurd person!” Connie sprang up, and came to kneel by the fire, so that she might attack her cousin at close quarters.  “We’re told it’s ’more blessed to give than to receive.’  Not when you’re on the premises, Nora!  I really don’t think you need make me feel such an outcast!  I say—­how many nights have you been awake lately?”