“I can’t help you,” said Alice.  “I am very sorry you ever came.”

“Thank you so much, dear.”

Alice ran downstairs.

“Mother,” she said, rushing into her mother’s presence, “we shall have no end of trouble with that terrible girl.  She is lying now on the bed with her outdoor boots on, and she won’t come to school, or do a single thing I want her to.”

“The money her father pays will be very welcome, Alice.  We must bear with some discomforts on account of that.”

“I suppose so,” said Alice, shrugging her shoulders.  “How horrid it is to be poor, and to have such a girl as that in the house!  Well, I can’t stay another minute.  You had better keep a sort of general eye on her, mother, for there’s no saying what she will do.  She has declared her intention of being naughty.  She knows no fear, is not guided by any sort of principle, and would, in short, do anything.”

“Well, go to school, Alice, and be quick home, for I have a great deal I want you to help me with.”

Alice made no reply, and Mrs. Tennant, after thinking for a minute, went upstairs.  She knocked at the door of the room which she had given up to the two girls.  There was no answer.  She opened it and went in.  The bird had flown.  There were evident signs of a stampede through the window, for it stood wide open, and there were marks of not too clean boots on the drugget, and a torn piece of ivy just without.  The window was twenty feet from the ground, and Kathleen must have let herself down by the sturdy arm of the old ivy.  Mrs. Tennant looked out, half expecting to see a mangled body on the ground; but there was no one in view.  She returned to her darning and her anxious thoughts.

She was a widow with two sons and a daughter, and something under two hundred and fifty pounds a year on which to live.  To educate the boys, to do something for Alice, and to put bread-and-butter into all their mouths was a difficult problem to solve in these expensive days.  She had on purpose moved close to the Great Shirley School in order to avail herself of its cheap education for Alice.  The boys went to another foundation school near by; and altogether the family managed to scrape along.  But the advent of Kathleen on the scene was a great relief, for her father paid three guineas a week for Mrs. Tennant’s motherly care and for Kathleen’s board and lodging.

“Poor child!” thought the good woman.  “What a wild, undisciplined, handsome creature she is!  I must do what I can for her.”

She sat on for some time darning and thinking.  Her heart was full; she felt depressed.  She had been working in various ways ever since six o’clock that morning, and the darning of the boys’ rough socks hurt her eyes and made her fingers ache.

Meanwhile Kathleen was running along the road.  She ran until she was completely out of breath.  She then came to a stile, against which she leant.  By-and-by she saw a girl walking leisurely up the road; she was a shabbily dressed and rather vulgar girl.  Kathleen saw at once that she was one of the Great Shirley girls, so she went forward and spoke to her.