“It happened just after we had come back from the sea last June. I was coming home from school on Saturday morning when, just outside the court-yard, I met Lady Romiaux. Just for a moment I did not know her, but she knew me directly, and stopped me and said how she had met you and Sigrid at a party and had ever since been so miserable to think that we were so poor, and somehow she had found out our address, and wanted to know all about us, only when she actually got to the door she did not like to come in. And she said she was so glad to see me, and asked all sorts of questions, and when she heard that you meant to pay off the debts she looked so sad, and she said that the bankruptcy was all her fault, and she asked how much I thought you had got toward it, and seemed quite horrified to think what a little it was, and what years the work would take. And then she said to me that she wanted to help, too, just a little, only that you must never know, and she thought I could easily pay in a five-pound note to your account at the bank, she said, without your knowing anything about it. She made me promise to do it secretly, and never to tell that it was from her. You can’t think how kindly she said it all, and how dreadfully sad she looked—I don’t think I could possibly have said ‘no’ to her. But afterward I began to see that I couldn’t very well pay the note into your account at the post-office, for I hadn’t got your little book that you always take, and besides I didn’t know which office you went to. So I worried about it all the next day, which was Sunday, and in the evening at church it suddenly came into my head that I would put it with your other money inside your waistcoat pocket.” Roy made an involuntary movement, Sigrid drew a little nearer, but Frithiof never stirred. Swanhild continued: “So the next morning, when I went into your bedroom to wake you up, I slipped the note into your pocket, and then I thought, just supposing you were to lose it, it seemed so light and so thin, and I pinned it to the lining to make it quite safe. You were sleeping very soundly, and were quite hard to wake up. At first I felt pretty happy about it, and I thought if you asked me if I had put it there when you found it out I should be able to say ‘yes’ and yet to keep Blanche’s secret. But you never said a word about it, and I was sure something had troubled you very much, and I was afraid it must be that, yet dared not speak about it and I tried to find out from Sigrid, but she only said that you had many troubles which I was too young to understand. It often made me very unhappy, but I never quite understood that I had done wrong till the night you found me reading the paper, and then I thought that I ought not to have made the promise to Lady Romiaux. This is the note which Mr. Osmond brought me from her.” Frithiof took the little crumpled sheet and read it.