Annie, too, was sitting idle at a short distance, with her hat thrown on the bed, but still wearing her jacket; and Dora, in her walking dress, was standing like a lady-in-waiting, or a sentry, behind Mrs. Millar's chair. Annie and Dora remained silent, looking at the intruders in a peculiar manner. At the same time the first pair did not tell the second more or less curtly, as the elder girls had been in the habit of doing not so very long ago, to go away and leave grown-up people to finish important discussions in peace. What other new thing could have come about? Was there a fresh wooer in the field, a second offer of marriage to be laid at reluctant feet? Was it Annie, their beauty, who was in request this time? Who was the lover? not Cyril Carey, with his plush waistcoat and gold chains and odious snuff-box? He had no means of keeping a wife, unless his father took him into partnership in the bank, and their father would not hear of Cyril; besides, Annie held him in supreme disdain. She had more patience with Tom Robinson and "the shop" than with the nineteenth century dandy, whom she pronounced a mistaken revival of one of the many curiosities of Queen Anne's reign. But Rose and May had no certainty that Annie was the object of pursuit. She was pretty enough, they had all pinned their faith to her beauty, yet already Dora had been preferred before her, though it was only by the head of "Robinson's." Was it possible that now it might be Rose, unsuspecting, unconsulted? Could her own mother and sisters be so unfair as to arrogate to themselves the settlement of her affairs without her consent or knowledge, without so much as admitting her into the conclave? Annie took the initiative, she was sufficiently quick to see both behind and before her. She had a head for directing and managing which her mother did not possess. "Mother, don't you see they had better be told at once?" she said, with the aplomb of a girl who, however young and irresponsible, is capable of arriving at independent conclusions and reversing existing conditions. "They are, as Rose says, all but grown up; indeed not so very much younger than Dora and I. I think Rose and May are entitled to be told." Annie was proceeding to act upon the permission implied in her mother's nod. She was not without some small sense of personal importance in being the mouthpiece which was to announce the calamity to her younger sisters. She did it in a very different fashion from that in which their mother had broken the news to her and Dora.