“It isn’t fair,” she thought hotly, “but it’s the way they manage the world. And now I have a chance the world shall pay me all it owes. Shabby clothes that were too tight,” she checked off her list on her fingers airily, “one-quarter enough to eat, chilblains--I shall charge a good price for chilblains”--remembering her swollen purple fingers and her shame of them; “hateful girls who sneered at my stockings and the holes in them--they were generally all holes--and a mother who did not care whether I was alive or dead so that I was out of her way. I have all that to make up to myself, and I will do it with--Miles Cylmer.” She started; she had all but spoken his name aloud, and standing behind her fresh as day was Cristiane le Marchant. Ismay’s veiled glance took her in swiftly. Her tailor-made serge was not new, but it looked as if she wore it every day; not like Ismay’s own, as if it were a new thing to be well dressed at breakfast. “They told me you were down, so I hurried,” Cristiane said quickly. “I was afraid you might be starving, and I did not think you would ring for breakfast.” “I always got up early at school,” said Ismay, her voice light and hard; “but I dare say I shall get over it. Mother is tired; she said I was to ask you if she might breakfast up-stairs.” “Of course; I’ll send it up,” Cristiane said absently. “Come along and we’ll have ours,” linking her arm through the slender one that was as strong as steel, and never dreaming that Mrs. Trelane’s daughter had rejoiced exceedingly that a bad night had reduced her mother’s temper and complexions to an unpresentable state. They had been two weeks at Marchant’s Hold, and never till now had Mrs. Trelane left the two girls together. It was not safe, while Ismay had that mad freak in her head about Cylmer, of Cylmer’s Ferry. A chance word, a too hard-pressed question, might in those early days have turned Cristiane’s growing liking for mother and daughter into jealous distrust--that liking on which their safety and peace depended. Mrs. Trelane worked harder to gain this one girl’s affection than she had ever done for that of all the men who had loved her. With almost superhuman cleverness she had warded off all mention of Cylmer’s name, for who knew what wild thing Ismay might say? Mrs. Trelane felt chilly as she remembered the ring of the girl’s voice that first day at Marchant’s Hold. “If he belonged to all the saints in heaven, he should come to me at the end.” It was no echo of her own voice, nor of Mrs. Trelane’s, and it made her shiver. But this morning neuralgia made her forgetful; a chance sight some days since of some words in Cristiane’s letter to her father left to dry on the library table had soothed her soul to peace. She turned comfortably to sleep in her warm bed up-stairs, careless that Ismay was at last alone with her hostess.