The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by the influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double blow of her parents’ deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit her youth rather hard.  Some old friends in Rome, with the full consent of her guardian, the Oxford Reader, had carried her off, first to Switzerland, and then to the Riviera for the winter, and now in May, about a year after the death of her parents, she was coming for the first time to make acquaintance with the Hooper family, with whom, according to her father’s will, she was to make her home till she was twenty-one.  None of them had ever seen her, except on two occasions; once, at a hotel in London; and once, some ten years before this date, when Lord Risborough had been D.C.L-ed at the Encaenia, as a reward for some valuable gifts which he had made to the Bodleian, and he, his wife, and his little girl, after they had duly appeared at the All Souls’ luncheon, and the official fete in St. John’s Gardens, had found their way to the house in Holywell, and taken tea with the Hoopers.

Nora’s mind, as she and her sister sat waiting for the fly in which Mrs. Hooper had gone to meet her husband’s niece at the station, ran persistently on her own childish recollections of this visit.  She sat in the window-sill, with her hand behind her, chattering to her sister.

“I remember thinking when Connie came in here to tea with us—­’What a stuck-up thing you are!’ And I despised her, because she couldn’t climb the mulberry in the garden, and because she hadn’t begun Latin.  But all the time, I envied her horribly, and I expect you did too, Alice.  Can’t you see her black silk stockings—­and her new hat with those awfully pretty flowers, made of feathers?  She had a silk frock too—­white, very skimp, and short; and enormously long black legs, as thin as sticks; and her hair in plaits.  I felt a thick lump beside her.  And I didn’t like her at all.  What horrid toads children are!  She didn’t talk to us much, but her eyes seemed to be always laughing at us, and when she talked Italian to her mother, I thought she was showing off, and I wanted to pinch her for being affected.”

“Why, of course she talked Italian,” said Alice, who was not much interested in her sister’s recollections.

“Naturally.  But that didn’t somehow occur to me.  After all I was only seven.”

“I wonder if she’s really good-looking,” said Alice slowly, glancing, as she spoke, at the reflection of herself in an old dilapidated mirror, which hung on the schoolroom wall.

“The photos are,” said Nora decidedly.  “Goodness, I wish she’d come and get it over.  I want to get back to my work—­and till she comes, I can’t settle to anything.”

“Well, they’ll be here directly.  I wonder what on earth she’ll do with all her money.  Father says she may spend it, if she wants to.  He’s trustee, but Uncle Risborough’s letter to him said she was to have the income if she wished—­now.  Only she’s not to touch the capital till she’s twenty-five.”