She wondered, with a feeling of pain at her heart, what Godfrey would think of them all.  There had been such an air of charm and gaiety about the place nine years ago.  Now, beautiful in a sense as was the stately Georgian house, lovely as was the garden, thanks to Janet’s cleverness and hard work, there was an air of shabbiness over everything though Betty only fully realised it on the very rare occasions when she got away for a few days for a change and rest with old friends.

This summer her brother Jack had said a word to her, not exactly complainingly, but with a sort of regret.  “Don’t you think we could afford new furniture covers for the drawing-room?” and Betty had shaken her head.  They could afford nothing for the house—­she alone knew how very difficult it was to keep up Jack’s own modest allowance.

There had been a discussion between herself and Janet as to whether Mr. Tosswill should start taking pupils again in his old age, but they had decided against it, largely because they felt that the class of pupils whom he had been accustomed to take before the war, and who could alone be of any use from the financial point of view, could not now be made really comfortable at Old Place.  Betty was ashamed of feeling how much it hurt her pride to know how concerned Godfrey would be to find how poor they had become.  She would not have minded this if he had been poor himself.  But she hated the thought of a rich Godfrey, who flung money about over foolish, extravagant presents, discovering, suddenly, how altered were their circumstances since the day when he had rushed out of the house throwing the big cheque kind John Tosswill had shamefacedly handed to him, on to the floor.

* * * * *

After Betty had had her own cold bath, and had prepared a tepid one for her father, she dressed quickly, and going over to the dressing-table in the large, low-ceilinged room—­a room which, in spite of the fact that everything in it was old and worn, had yet an air of dainty charm and dignity, for everything in it was what old-fashioned people call “good”—­she looked dispassionately at herself in the glass.

Her step-mother had said, “You haven’t changed one bit!” But that was not true.  Of course she had changed—­changed very much, outwardly and inwardly, since she was nineteen.  For one thing, the awful physical strain of her work in France had altered her, turned her from a girl into a woman.  She had seen many terrible things, and she had met with certain grim adventures she could never forget, which remained all the more vivid because she had never spoken of them to a living being.