Nora shrank a little. "Oh, I can't do that, Janetta: I really can't. She would be so angry!" "There is another way, then: you must tell Cuthbert Brand not to send you any more flowers, and ask him to give no more drawing lessons at that school." "Oh, Janetta, I _can't_. He has never said that he came to see me, and it would look as if I thought----" "What you do think in your heart," said Janetta. Then, thinking that she had been a little brutal, she added, more gently--"But there is perhaps no need to decide to-day or to-morrow what we are to do. We can think over it and see if there is a better way. All that I am determined upon is that your doings must be fair and open." "And you won't speak to anybody else about it, will you?" said Nora, rather relieved by this respite, and hoping to elude Janetta's vigilance still. "I shall promise nothing," Janetta answered. "I must think about it." She turned to leave the room, but was arrested by a burst of sobbing and a piteous appeal. "You are very unkind, Janetta. I thought that you would have sympathized." Janetta stood still and sighed. "I don't know what to say, Nora," she said. "You are very cold--very hard. You do not care one bit what I feel." Perhaps, thought Janetta, the reproach had some truth in it. At any rate she went quietly out of the room and closed the door, leaving Nora to cry as long and as heartily as she pleased. The elder sister went straight to Georgie. That young person, frank and boisterous by nature, was not given to deceit, and, although she was reluctant at first to betray Nora's confidence, she soon acknowledged that it was a relief to her to speak the truth and the whole truth to Janetta. Her account tallied in the main with the one given by Nora. There did not seem to have been more than a little concealment, a little flirting, a little folly; but Janetta was aghast to think of the extent to which Nora might have been compromised, and indignant at Cuthbert Brand's culpable thoughtlessness--if it was nothing worse. "What people have said of the Brands is true," she declared vehemently to herself. "They work mischief wherever they go; they have no goodness, no pity, no feeling of right and wrong. I thought that Cuthbert looked good, but he is no better than the others, and there is nothing to be hoped from any of them. And father told me to take care of his children--and I promised. What can I do? His 'faithful Janetta' cannot leave them to take their own way--to go to ruin if they please! Oh, my poor Nora! You did not mean any harm, and perhaps I _was_ hard on you!" She relieved herself by a few quiet but bitter tears; and then she was forced to leave the consideration of the matter for the present, as there were many household duties to attend to which nobody could manage but herself.