'Your father was so upset by Miss Pew's letter,' she murmured apologetically. 'To pay fifty pounds for you, and for it to end in such humiliation as that. You must own that it was hard for us.' 'It was harder for me,' said Ida; 'I had to stand up and face that wicked woman, who knew that I had done no wrong, and who wreaked her malignity upon me because I am cleverer and better-looking than ever she was in her life.' 'I must go and make your father's omelette,' said the stepmother, 'while you tidy yourself for breakfast. I think there's some water on the washstand, and Vernon shall bring you a clean towel.' The little fellow trotted out after his mother, and trotted back presently with the towel--one towel, which was about in proportion to the water-jug and basin. Ida shuddered, remembering the plentitude of water and towels at The Knoll. She made her toilet as well as she could, with the scantiest materials, as she might have done on board ship; shook and brushed the shabby gray cashmere--her wedding gown, she thought, with a bitter smile--before she put it on again, and then went down the bare narrow deal staircase, superb in all the freshness of her youth and beauty, which neither care nor poverty could spoil. Captain Palliser was pacing up and down his little dining parlour, looking flurried and anxious. He turned suddenly as Ida entered, and stood staring at her. 'By Jove, how handsome you have grown!' he said, and then he look her in his arms and kissed her. 'But you know, my dear, this is really too bad,' he went on in a fretful tone,' to come back upon us like a bad penny.' 'That is what my step-mother said just now.' 'My dear, how can one help saying it, when it's the truth? After my paying fifty pounds, don't you know, and thinking that you were comfortably disposed of for the next three years, and that at the expiry of the term Miss Pew would place you in a gentleman's family, where you would receive from sixty to a hundred per annum, according to your acquirements--those were her very words--to have you sent back to us like this, in disgrace, and to be told that you had been carrying on in an absurd way with a young man on the bank of a river. It is most humiliating. And now my wife tells me the young man has not a sixpence which makes the whole thing so very culpable.' 'Please let me tell you the extent of my iniquity, father, and then you can judge what right Miss Pew had to expel me.' Whereupon Ida quietly described her afternoon promenades upon the river-path, with the Fräulein always in her company, and how her friend's cousin had been permitted to walk up and down with them. 'Nobody supposes there was any actual harm,' replied Captain Palliser, 'but you must have been perfectly aware that you were acting foolishly--that this kind of thing was a violation of the school etiquette. Come, now, you knew Miss Pew would disapprove of such goings on, did you not?'