There was never any use trying to get an advantage over Miss Izzy in verbal skirmishes, so I gave in, and, as the shop appeared to be comparatively deserted to-night, I sat down on an empty wooden box, and read aloud to her the first two chapters of the novel I had brought from the library. It was Hardy’s “Two on a Tower,” and as I turned the pages, the circumstances, so different, under which I had read them before, kept floating into my mind. When I had finished the second chapter, and drummed for a while with my heels against the box, I went upstairs, and got out my notes on French composition to look them over before to-morrow’s examination. The room, although the window was wide open, seemed to me unbearably stuffy, and moreover I had a slight headache and felt tired and irritable. I put up with the heat for half an hour, and then undressed and sat down in my nightshirt close to the window, which looked out on to a dirty strip of back garden, threaded with clothes-lines, and forming, after dark, a kind of debased Paradise for dissipated cats. At half-past ten or so George stepped jauntily in. “Hello! Not done yet?” He took the now withered flower from his button-hole and flung it out among the cats; then he began to turn over some papers I had laid down on the table in the exact order I required them. “You’ll mix those up,” I said crossly. “Leave them alone.” George threw the papers down. “All right. Keep your wool on!” Two or three of the sheets fluttered to the floor. I picked them up in a very bad temper, and George began to whistle――the same few bars over and over again. “Oh, shut up,” I cried. “Can’t you see I’m working?” “Temper! Temper!” said George, cheerfully. “I’ll have to tell Katherine about this!” He was standing before the looking-glass, and had begun to remove his dickey; but at the very moment of speaking he knew he had made a mistake. He looked round with a sort of foolish, apologetic grin. I, too, knew that his words had slipped out unintentionally, for I had never mentioned Katherine’s name to him. There were, in fact, only two ways in which he could have come by his information: either Aunt Margaret had managed to get hold of some of my letters again, or else he had read one of them himself. “What do you mean?” I asked coldly, looking steadily into his eyes as they were reflected in the glass. George tried to laugh it off. “I was only joking,” he said, nervously. But I wanted a better explanation than this. “Who told you about Katherine?” I asked, getting up from my chair deliberately, and walking over to him, while he spun round to meet me with bright eyes and a forced smile. “What’s the matter? What are you losin’ your rag about? I don’t want to annoy you.” “The matter is this: I want to know if you have been reading my letters? If you have, you must have unlocked the box I keep them in.” “I never unlocked any box.” George backed away from me, his eyes not leaving mine.