Kitty scoffed at such an idea.  “Aunt Pike is sure to tell; but father is never very angry.”

“But he might be,” said Betty wisely; “he looked so last night when all the mud dropped on his plate; but, of course, this is different—­there is nothing very bad about my writing the letter.  I did it to save him trouble.”

“Perhaps you had better tell father so,” said Kitty dryly.  “Honour bright, though, Betty, I really would tell him, and not let him first find it out from Aunt Pike.”

“Um!” ejaculated Betty thoughtfully, as she collected Kitty’s sponge and bath-towel before departing to the bathroom.  But there was nothing very hearty in her tone.

When she returned, looking very fresh and rosy, and damp about the curls, she found Kitty sitting on the side of her bed, and still in her night-gown.  Hearing Betty’s returning footsteps, she had managed to get so far before the door was flung open, but that was all.

“Isn’t it dreadful,” she sighed wearily, “to think that day after day, year after year, all my life through, I shall have to get up in the morning and go through all the same bother of dressing, and I—­I hate it so.”

“P’r’aps you won’t have to,” said Betty cheerfully; “p’r’aps you’ll be a bed-lier like Jane Trebilcock, and you won’t have to have boots, or dresses, or hats.”

But the prospect did not cheer Kitty very greatly.  “I didn’t say I didn’t want dresses and things.  I do.  I want lots of them, but I don’t want the bother of putting them on.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be much good if you didn’t put them on,” retorted practical Betty.  “I hate getting up too”—­Betty never failed in her experience of any form of suffering or unpleasantness—­“but I try to make it a little different every day, to help me on.  Sometimes I pretend the bath is the sea, and I am bathing; other times I only paddle my feet, and sometimes I don’t bath at all—­that’s when I am playing that I am a gipsy or a tramp—­”

“Betty, you nasty, horrid, dirty little thing!” cried Kitty, looking shocked.

But Betty was quite unabashed.  “I’ve known you not wash either,” she remarked calmly.

Kitty coloured.  “But—­but that was only once when I forgot; that is quite different.”

“But I don’t see that it is,” said Betty firmly.  You are not cleaner because you forget to wash than if you don’t wash on purpose.  Hark!  O Kitty!”

“What shall I do?” cried Kitty despairingly as the boom of the breakfast-gong sounded through the house.  “I haven’t begun to dress, and—­Fanny might have told me she was going to be punctual to-day.”

“P’r’aps she didn’t know it herself,” said Betty, tugging away at her tangle of curls with a comb, and scattering the teeth of it in a shower.  “I expect it is an accident.”

“Then I wish she wouldn’t have accidents,” snapped Kitty.  “It is awfully hard on other people.”