‘You little intriguer!’ wrote Lord Glaramara—‘I will do what I can. Your man sounds very suitable. If he isn’t, I can tell you plainly, he won’t get the post. Neither political party can afford to employ fools just now. But if he is what you say—well, we shall see! Send him up to see me, at the House of Lords, almost any evening next week. He’ll have to take his chance, of course, of finding me free. If I cotton to him, I’ll send him on to somebody else. And—_don’t talk about it_! Your letter was just like your mother. She had an art of doing these things!’ Alice read and re-read the note. When she looked up from it, it was with a rather fluttered face. ‘Awfully good of you, Connie! May I show it—to Mr. Pryce?’ ‘Yes—but get it back. Tell him to write to Lord Glaramara—to-morrow. Well, now then’—Connie discovered and lit a cigarette, the sight of which stirred in Alice a kind of fascinated disapproval,—‘now then, tell me what’s the matter!—why Uncle Ewen looks as if he hadn’t had a day’s rest since last term, and Nora’s so glum—and why he and she go sitting up at night together when they ought to be in their beds?’ Connie’s little woman-of-the-world air—very evident in this speech—which had always provoked Alice in their earlier acquaintance, passed now unnoticed. Miss Hooper sat perplexed and hesitating, staring into the fire. But with that note in her pocket, Alice felt herself at once in a new and detached position towards her family. ‘It’s money, of course,’ she said at last, her white brow puckering. ‘It’s not only bills—they’re dreadfully worrying!—we seem never to get free from them, but it’s something else—something quite new—which has only happened lately. There was an old loan from the bank, that has been going on for years. Father had almost forgotten it, and now they’re pressing him. It’s dreadful! They know we’re so hard up.’ Connie in her turn looked perplexed. It was always difficult for her to realise financial trouble on a small scale. Ruin on the Falloden scale was intelligible to one who had heard much talk of the bankruptcies of some of the great Roman families, owing to the building speculations of Rome, after 1870. But the carking care that may come from lack of a few hundred pounds, this the Risboroughs’ daughter had to learn; and she put her mind to it, eagerly. She propped her small chin on her hands, while Alice told her tale. Apparently the improvement in the family finance, caused by Connie’s three hundred, had been the merest temporary thing. The Reader’s creditors had been held off for a few months; but the rain of tradesmen’s letters had been lately incessant. And the situation had been greatly worsened by a blow which had fallen just before the opening of term.