She would come to her lesson, overtired from the strain of the morning classes, over-stimulated from the contact with Clare, over-hopeful or utterly depressed, as the mood took her. Alwynne's cheerful interest was balm to the child's overwrought nerves. Alwynne let her spend a quarter of an hour or more in confiding the worries and excitements of the day, after which, Louise, curiously revived, contrived to get through an amazing amount of work. There was no doubt as to Louise's capacity for advanced work, but her state of mind affected her output; she was, as Alwynne once phrased it to Clare, "like a violin--you had to tune her up before she was fit for use." And Alwynne's "tuning" had done more than she or Clare or even Louise herself had guessed, towards her success in her new class. Bit by bit, Alwynne had heard all about Louise; the details of her meagre home-life; her attitude to the busy world of school, that frightened while it attracted her; her difficulties with her fellows; her delight in her work. Finally, there was Clare. Louise was very shy about Clare; inclined to scent mockery, to be on the defensive; but Alwynne's own matter-of-fact enthusiasm had its effect. Also Alwynne's interest, though it invited, never demanded confidences. It took Louise some time to realise that it arose from simple friendliness of soul; that there was neither curiosity nor pedagogic zeal behind it; that, though she was teased and laughed at, she was respected, and, out of school hours, treated as an equal; that she and her schoolgirl secrets were safe with Miss Durand. It was, indeed, in the light of after events, pathetic that Louise, dazzled by Clare's will-o'-the-wisp brilliance, never realised how close to her for a season the friend, the elder sister she had longed for, really stood. With the egoism of a child, and a child in love, she was humbly and passionately grateful for Clare's least sign of interest, yet accepted all the many little kindnesses that Alwynne showed her, as a matter of course. She scarcely realised, absorbed as she was in Clare, that she was even fond of Miss Durand, yet she relied on her implicitly: and Alwynne, innocent of the jealous, acquisitive impulse that tainted Clare's intercourse with any girl who caught her fancy, was not at all disturbed or hurt by Louise's attitude. She looked after the child as she would have looked after a starving cat or a fugitive emperor, if they had come her way, as a matter of course, and as instinctively as she ate her dinner.