Some loose sheets lay on the top of the papers in the drawer. The first was covered with figures and calculations that told nothing. Connie lifted it, and there, beneath, lay Nora’s latest “statement,” at which she and her father had no doubt been working that very night. It was headed “List of Liabilities,” and in it every debt, headed by the bank claim which had broken the family back, was accurately and clearly stated in Nora’s best hand. The total at the foot evoked a low whistle from Connie. How had it come about? In spite of her luxurious bringing up, there was a shrewd element—an element of competence—in the girl’s developing character, which was inclined to suggest that there need be no more difficulty in living on seven hundred a year than seven thousand, if you knew you had to do it. Then she rebuked herself fiercely for a prig—“You just try it!—you Pharisee, you!” And she thought of her own dressmakers’ and milliners’ bills, and became in the end quite pitiful over Aunt Ellen’s moderation. After all it might have been two thousand instead of one! Of course it was all Aunt Ellen’s muddling, and Uncle Ewen’s absent-mindedness. She shaded her candle, and in a guilty hurry copied down the total on a slip of paper lying on the table, and took the address of Uncle Ewen’s bank from the outside of the pass-book lying beside the bills. Having done that, she Closed the drawer again, and crept upstairs like the criminal she felt herself. Her small feet in their thin stockings seemed to her excited ears to be making the most hideous and unnatural noise on every step. If Nora heard! At last she was safe in her own room again. The door was locked, and the more agreeable part of the crime began. She drew out the new cheque-book lying in her own drawer, and very slowly and deliberately wrote a cheque. Then she put it up, with a few covering words—anxiously considered—and addressed the envelope to the Oxford branch of a well-known banking firm, her father’s bankers, to which her own account had been transferred on her arrival at Oxford. Ewen Hooper had scrupulously refrained from recommending his own bank, lest he should profit indirectly by his niece’s wealth. “Annette shall take it,” she thought, “first thing. Oh, what a row there’ll be!” And then, uneasily pleased with her performance, she went to bed. And she had soon forgotten all about her raid upon Uncle Ewen’s affairs. Her thoughts floated to a little cottage on the hills, and its two coming inhabitants. And in her dream she seemed to hear herself say—“I oughtn’t to be meddling with other people’s lives like this. I don’t know enough. I’m too young! I want somebody to show me—I do!”