“My father always insisted on our keeping an account of our money, and how we spent it,” she used to say to her nieces. “It is an excellent plan, my dears, for then you know where you are and how you stand.” These desirable results did not always occur in her own case, though that did not deter her nieces from following the suggestion, each according to her nature,--Theresa with neatness and some success, Bella with results not unlike her aunt’s, Polly--there were commercial instincts in Polly’s blood and her untidy books were kept with an accuracy which might have savoured of sharp practice to any one who could comprehend them. Bill, of course, was too young to be considered, and too penniless to keep a record of her non-existent income; moreover, she was only “Poor little Bill--Wilhelmina”--Miss Brownlow invariably made the correction in mind and sometimes in speech. She sighed as she thought about the girl,--she had just come to the item _one shilling, a bottle of Stephens’s blue-black writing-ink_. Bill had on Thursday upset the last bottle on the schoolroom-floor, in class, too, with all the little girls looking on. How they giggled! Polly said afterwards that Bill made them, but Miss Brownlow did not think so. Bill was too old to do anything so wrong; she was seventeen now, though she seemed such a child. Polly, who was perhaps not without authority on the subject, was of opinion that age had little to do with iniquity, but Miss Brownlow was not convinced. In any case she had to pay the shilling for another bottle of ink. The column of figures she was now counting up did not come to the total she expected: “Now what have I forgotten?” she said. Bella and Theresa glanced up but did not hazard a suggestion; they knew the remark was not addressed to them, and they went on correcting French exercises in silence. These French exercises were really Bella’s work, but Theresa was helping her with them to-night. A year ago they were Theresa’s own, but when she married her sister had taken up that part of her work. Theresa was on a visit to Miss Brownlow, and finding herself back among the familiar surroundings it came quite natural to her to take up some part of the old duties; besides, she liked to help Bella. As the two tall sisters sat close together, sharing the same dictionary and sometimes bending over the same page, Miss Brownlow thought they made a beautiful picture; possibly even a less prejudiced observer might not have entirely disagreed. Polly was certainly not a prejudiced observer, yet even she admitted the sisters’ beauty in a general way. She did not look in their direction now, for she was busy with her needlework. She sat opposite to Miss Brownlow, close to the lamp, her dressmaking scattered around her. She possessed a perfect genius for what is technically known as “doing up” her clothes; consequently some of them were always undergoing alterations and repairs, and none of them kept the same appearance for long together.