"Alicia!" she exclaimed, "you can't think that you are making things easier for me by talking like that. I have _some_ little sense of what is due to a guest, especially after the way mother has put it. Trixie indeed! Why, I mean to do my best to keep the girl out of Trixie's and Mabella's notice altogether. I pity her if she is what I expect, if she should come in their way. They are particularly wild just now, too." "Mother should have waited till Mabella was gone," said Alicia, calmly. "Of course she should. But she couldn't, by the bye. Mrs What's-her-name--Wentworth--this Mrs Wentworth wrote offering a visit before Christmas, when they are going abroad somewhere. Oh, it really is too bad--" The sisters were together in a sitting-room, appropriated to themselves, and in which they firmly believed that an immense amount of important business was transacted. It was a pretty little room, not specially tidy it must be confessed; but with the comfortable, prosperous air peculiar to everything to do with the Helmont family. "Yes," Florence repeated, "it is too bad." She pushed her chair back impatiently from the table at which she had been writing; as she did so, the door opened. Her brother Oliver and another man came in. "What's the matter? Florence, you look, for you, decidedly--how shall I express it?--not cross, `discomposed' shall we say? Scold her, Rex; she has an immense respect for you, like every one else. Impress upon her that there is nothing and nobody in this weary world worth putting one's self out about." The person addressed--a man ten years at least the senior of Oliver Helmont, who was the brother next in age to Florence--smiled slightly. "What is the matter, Florence?" he repeated in turn, as he took up his station on the hearthrug; for it was November, and chilly. "Ask Alicia," said Florence. "She's patienter than I. I'm too cross to explain." Major Winchester looked towards Miss Helmont. "It's nothing to make such a fuss about," she said. "It's only Florrie's way." "It's not the _family_ way, it must be allowed," remarked Oliver, complacently. Major Winchester glanced at him quickly, not to say sharply. "No," he said drily, "it is not.--Well, Alicia?" "It's only that some stupid people are coming to stay here next week--a mother and daughter, and we have too many women already, for one thing. And the girl is almost a child, only just out, and the mother's not much better, I fancy. They have been living in some out-of-the-way place, I forget where, for some years, since the father's death, and he was an old friend of mother's, and his parents were very good to her long ago, when her parents died. So she wants to be kind to this girl, and she's rather put her upon Florence and me, and--I don't see that it's anything to fuss about, but--" "As you have never fussed about anything since you were born, Alicia, it isn't to be expected you will begin now," said Florence.