On the following Saturday it rained all day, and no horseback-riding or excursions of any sort were possible. Before another half-holiday had come round, an unusual and severe pressure of work had overtaken Peter, which shut him off from any leisure whatever for many successive weeks. Night after night, all through July and August, he came home late in the evening, too weary for anything but supper and bed. During all this time he saw little of the people in Worthington Square. As for Shirley, although she thought often of Peter, and was sorry that no chance seemed to favour her getting at the secret of his burdens, whatever they might be, her own work absorbed her. She was proving a ready pupil, keen of intellect and quick of eye and hand. As she advanced in the mastery of stenography, she became more and more fascinated by its details, and spent more and more of her spare hours in practice. The typewriting she acquired in an unexpectedly short space of time, but her chief ambition was to achieve the ability to take dictation rapidly and accurately, and to this end she laboured with much zeal. Nancy Bell was taken into confidence, and became an active and interested partner. Many were the hours she spent with Shirley, reading aloud to her from all sorts of books and papers, with a view to accustoming her to any kind of composition. "You certainly can do anything now," Nancy said, one day in late September, when she had given Shirley an unusually trying test at top speed, and the worker had typewritten it without an error worth mentioning. "I ’m not so sure." Shirley studied her paper. "I ’m used to you, and you don’t flurry me much. But if I should go to father and offer myself for a trial, I ’m afraid I should bungle it." "But you can’t get office practice without office practice. Nothing can take its place or give you confidence, I should think. Why don’t you let Murray try you? If he dictates as fast as he talks when he ’s discussing business with Peter, he must be hard enough for anybody." That evening, as Murray and Jane, in the library, were discussing certain household matters, Shirley, sitting at the big table with her notebook, turned a leaf and began to take down the conversation. "Did I say that?" Murray asked, toward the close of the conference. "I thought I put it quite differently." "You said, dear," said Jane, "that it ought to cost that, not that it did." "Are you sure?" "Quite sure." "I must have been wandering in my mind. I seem to hear myself saying in a tone of great assurance that it actually did cost seventeen dollars. I could n’t have said anything else, knowing the facts."