Rose carefully measured the tea into the pretty Japanese teapot. Pauline leant against the dresser and watched her with her hands clasped at the back of her head. Pauline was not pretty,--her features were badly cut and her skin was sallow,--but she made a pretty picture standing there. Her dress of ruddy brown was made in a graceful, artistic fashion, and was just the right colour to set off her dark eyes and dark, wavy hair. Rose thought her friend beautiful. She had adored her from the first day they met, when Pauline was junior English governess at Miss Jephson’s Collegiate School for Young Ladies at Brighton, and Rose was a frightened, lonely, homesick child of fourteen, tasting her first experience of boarding-school. Pauline had had many adorers among the younger girls, and a holiday rarely passed without her receiving some delightful invitations. It was spitefully noticed by the senior English governess that she was very rarely invited twice to the same house; but after Rose came to the school, it became a matter of course that Pauline should spend her holidays at Woodcote. She had no home of her own, as she often sadly told the girls. She very seldom said more than that, but it was understood in the school that the seal ring she wore at her watch-chain belonged to her father, one of the Norfolk Smythes; and the beautiful woman with powdered hair, whose miniature hung in her bedroom, was her great-grandmother, the Marquise de Villeroy, who perished on the scaffold during the Reign of Terror. It was considered a high privilege by Pauline’s band of worshippers to be allowed to hold this miniature in their hands; but on Rose a still higher privilege had been once conferred. She had worn the miniature tied round her neck by a blue ribbon when she acted a part in the French play Miss Jephson’s pupils produced every Christmas. That was in Rose’s last year at school. She left at the end of the next term, as her aunt was in failing health and wanted her at home. Soon Pauline left too, and after a brief experience as a private governess, commenced to give visiting lessons in London. She lived at first with a cousin of Miss Jephson’s, a clergyman’s widow; but the arrangement did not somehow prove a satisfactory one, and it was a relief to them both when Clare Desborough, whose old admiration for Pauline had revived on meeting her in London, had begged her to share the little flat her mother had consented to rent for her, while the family spent the winter in Italy. Pauline found the freedom of a flat delightful, and looked forward with a sinking heart to the day of Lady Desborough’s return. Her only hope was that Rose might be induced to entreat her aunt to let her live in London, so that she might study music at the Royal Academy. Pauline was sure that Miss Merivale would consent, if only Rose’s pleading was urgent enough. Rose had had her own way all her life. {Illustration: PAULINE LEANT AGAINST THE DRESSER AND WATCHED HER.}