‘Oh, Miss Merrifield, do not your aunts know?’

‘No.  Why should they?  Mamma does.’

’Not yet.  And she is so far off!  I wish Miss Mohun knew!  I made sure that she did,’ said Kalliope, much distressed.

‘But why?  It would only make a fuss.’

‘I should be much happier about it.’

‘And perhaps have it all upset.’

’That is the point.  I felt that it must be all right as long as Miss Mohun sanctioned it; but I could not bear that we should be the means of bringing you into a scrape, by doing what she might disapprove while you are under her care.’

‘Don’t you think you can trust me to know my own relations?’ said Gillian somewhat haughtily.

‘Indeed, I did not mean that we are not infinitely obliged to you,’ said Kalliope.  ’It has made Alexis another creature to have some hope, and feel himself making progress.’

’Then why do you want to have a fuss, and a bother, and a chatter?  If my father and mother don’t approve, they can telegraph.’

With which argument she appeased or rather silenced Kalliope, who could not but feel the task of objecting alike ungracious and ungrateful towards the instructor, and absolutely cruel and unkind towards her brother, and who spoke only from a sense of the treachery of allowing a younger girl to transgress in ignorance.  Still she was conscious of not understanding on what terms the niece and aunts might be, and the St. Kenelm’s estimate of the Beechcroft ladies was naturally somewhat different from that of the St. Andrew’s congregation.  Miss Mohun was popularly regarded in those quarters as an intolerable busybody, and Miss Adeline as a hypochondriacal fine lady, so that Gillian might perhaps reasonably object to put herself into absolute subjection; so, though Kalliope might have a presentiment of breakers ahead, she could say no more, and Gillian, feeling that she had been cross, changed the subject by admiring the pretty short curly hair that was being tied back at the glass.

‘I wish it would grow long,’ said Kalliope.  ’But it always was rather short and troublesome, and ever since it was cut short in the fever, I have been obliged to keep it like this.’

‘But it suits you,’ said Gillian.  ‘And it is exactly the thing now.’

’That is the worst of it.  It looks as if I wore it so on purpose.  However, all our hands know that I cannot help it, and so does Lady Flight.’

The girl looked exceedingly well, though little Alice, the maid, would not have gone out to tea in such an ancient black dress, with no relief save a rim of white at neck and hands, and a tiny silver Maltese cross at the throat.  Maura had a comparatively new gray dress, picked out with black.  She was a pretty creature, the Irish beauty predominating over the Greek, in her great long-lashed brown eyes, which looked radiant with shy happiness.  Miss Adeline was perfectly taken by surprise at the entrance of two such uncommon forms and faces, and the quiet dignity of the elder made her for a moment suppose that her sister must have invited some additional guest of undoubted station.