Molly herself seemed to float through life like a big, beautiful moth, sailing serenely along, and now and then blundering into things, but never learning by experience the dangers of such blunders.  One day, in the course of her inconsequent path through life, she would probably flutter too near the attractive blaze of some perilous fire, just as a moth flies against the flame of a candle and singes its frail, soft wings in the process.

It was of this that Sara was inwardly afraid, realizing, perhaps more clearly than the girl’s overworked and sometimes absent-minded father, the risks attaching to her temperament.

Of late, Molly had manifested a certain moodiness and irritability very unlike her usual facile sweetness of disposition, and Sara was somewhat nonplussed to account for it.  Finally, she approached the matter by way of a direct inquiry.

“What’s wrong, Molly?”

Molly was hunched up in the biggest and shabbiest armchair by the fire, smoking innumerable cigarettes and flinging them away half-finished.  At Sara’s question, she looked up with a shade of defiance in her eyes.

“Why should anything be wrong?” she countered, obviously on the defensive.

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” responded Sara good-humouredly.  “But I’m pretty certain there is something.  Come, out with it, you great baby!”

Molly sighed, smoked furiously for a moment, and then tossed her cigarette into the fire.

“Well, yes,” she admitted at last.  “There is—­something wrong.”  She rose and stood looking across at Sara like a big, perplexed child.  “I—­I owe some money.”

Sara was conscious of a distinct shock.

“How much?” she asked sharply.

“It’s—­it’s rather a lot—­twenty pounds!”

“Twenty pounds!” This was certainly a large sum for Molly—­whose annual dress allowance totaled very little more—­to be in debt.  “What on earth have you been up to?  Buying a new trousseau?  Where do you owe it—­Carr & Bishop’s?”—­mentioning the principal draper’s shop in Oldhampton.

“No.  I—­don’t owe it to a shop at all.  It’s—­it’s a bridge debt!” The confession came out rather hurriedly.

Sara’s face grew grave.

“But, Molly, you little fool, you’ve no business to be playing bridge.  Where have you been playing?”

“Oh, we play sometimes at the studios—­when the light’s too bad to go on painting, you know”—­airily.

“You mean,” said Sara, “the artists’ club people play?”

“Yes.”

Sara frowned.  She knew that Molly was one of the youngest members of this club of rather irresponsible and happy-go-lucky folk, and privately considered that Selwyn had made a great mistake in ever allowing her to join it.  It embodied, as she had discovered by inquiry, some of the most rapid elements of Oldhampton’s society, and was, moreover, open to receive as temporary members artists who come from other parts of the country to paint in the neighbourhood.  More than one well-known name had figured in the temporary membership list, and, in addition, the name of certain dilettanti to whom the freedom from convention of the artistic life signified far more that art itself.