"I wish you had told me this sooner," Mr. Wycherly remonstrated, "then perhaps I might have been able to obtain help for to-morrow elsewhere." But what they were to do on the morrow was no concern of Mrs. Griffin’s. It was an easy and lucrative place and she wanted no interlopers. But she also wanted her outing to Abingdon, and she was going. Mr. Wycherly poured out the black tea and Edmund attacked a piece of bread-and-butter. The red rep curtains from the dining-room at Remote were hung in the dining-room at Oxford, but they in no way shrouded its inmates from the public gaze except when they were drawn at night. The house stood right on the pavement; even a small child could see in, and a good many availed themselves of the privilege. Over this room was the boys’ bedroom. Here there were no "fixtures" on which to suspend curtains, nor did it strike either of the three most concerned that blinds or curtains were an immediate necessity. They had all lived in a house that stood so far from other houses (as its name signified) that such a contingency as prying neighbours never occurred to them and it never entered their heads to concern themselves with those on the other side of the road. Presently Mrs. Griffin brought in a note held gingerly between her finger and thumb, remarking that it was from the "lady as lives hopposite." Mr. Wycherly opened it hastily, found he had mislaid his glasses, and handed it to Montagu to read. Edmund immediately rushed round to assist Montagu, thinking it was probably an invitation, and Edmund liked invitations. Montagu read it slowly and impressively as follows:— "DEAR SIR, "I think it only right to inform you that I can see the young gentlemen performing their ablutions and dressing and undressing both when the light is on and in the morning. Such publicity is most distressing, and I venture to suggest that blinds or curtains should be affixed in their room without delay. "Yours faithfully, "SELINA BROOKS." Mr. Wycherly sank back in his chair with a groan. "I quite forgot curtains and blinds," he exclaimed in bitter self-reproach. "There are none in my room either; do you suppose the people in the next house can see _me_?" "Sure to!" cried Edmund gleefully; "they’ll be writing next that they can see an _old_ gentleman ’paforming his ablutions’; but I can’t see how they do for we all wash in the bath-room, and that’s at the back. I suppose they see us washing our teeth and you shaving. I wonder if that’s more depressing or they don’t mind so much?" "But what can we do?" Mr. Wycherly exclaimed despairingly. "It is already Saturday evening and we ought to have blinds or something now, to-night. How do they fix blinds, by the way?" Montagu went and stood at the window and gloomily surveyed the houses opposite.