"Yes--if you both live. He will want to see you again more than anything in the world, except paying off his debt. When that is done, he will rush straight off to you and say, `Here I am. I have worked hard and kept my promise. To-day I can look the whole world in the face, for I owe not any man. I have regained my friend and my position, and it is your doing. _You_ saved me! All these years the thought of you has been my inspiration. I have lived in the thought of seeing your face again--'" "Oh, oh, oh!" cried Betty, gasping. "And I shall be hideous, Cynthia, hideous! Fancy, I may be thirty! What will he think, when he sees me so changed?" "He won't mind a bit--they never do. He will say, `Though worn and haggard, you are still in my eyes the most beautiful woman in the world!'" cried Cynthia. And then, being only eighteen--nearly eighteen--each girl suddenly descended from her high horse, and went off into peal after peal of laughter, merry, heart-whole laughter, which floated to Mrs Alliot's ears as she lay on her couch in the drawing-room, and brought a smile to her pale face. This new friendship was doing great things for her lonely girl! Towards the end of the Christmas holidays the great news circulated that Mrs Vanburgh was coming home, and bringing her two younger sisters for a few weeks' shopping in town. Agatha and Christabel had just returned from two years' sojourn abroad, and were presumably "finished" young ladies. Cynthia and Betty wondered how much finished, and whether finished enough to look down with contempt upon unfinished damsels still undergoing the thraldom of "classes!" It was a thrilling occasion when they were bidden to tea "to meet my sisters," and Betty felt she would hardly have had courage to face the ordeal but for the fact of a new blouse and that fascinating buckle on her belt. She had a sensation of being all arms and legs--a horrible, almost forgotten remnant of schoolroom days--as she crossed Mrs Vanburgh's drawing-room to be introduced to the two strange figures on the sofa. One was dark and one was fair; both possessed a wonderful wealth of beautiful glossy hair, gold in the one case, in the other brown, rolling back from the brow in upstanding pompadours, which were, however, more picturesque than stiff, and rolled into coil after coil at the back of the neck. Done-up hair--that was very "finished" indeed! Both were distinctly good-looking, and the younger, though the smaller of the two, possessed a personality which at once seemed to constitute her mistress of the ceremonies. Both were perfectly at ease, and so full of conversation that they talked both at the same time, emphasising every second or third word after a quaint fashion of their own which Betty found very amusing.