She took a clean blouse from a drawer, laid it out on her bed, and then, reaching for a towel, started for the bathroom. Before she reached the bathroom, however, one of her conjectures was already answered. Richenda Earle's cubicle was on the same corridor as hers, four doors lower down, and she met Richenda herself, who had come back from her vacation a week before, by the embrasure of one of the latticed courtyard windows. It was almost dark; in the recess the little reflectored oil lamp had been lighted, and it shone on the Scholarship girl's copper hair and angular shoulders. Louie stopped. She did so deliberately. Let Earle allude if she dared. "You washed?" she said, on a rising note. "No, not yet. I--I came up for a book," said Richenda. "You're not studying to-night, are you?" "Ye-es--oh yes, I must." "Classification?" "Ye-es--yes." "How far have you got now?" Louie's mood was on her. It was overdue, but it had come now, and she was challenging Earle. Nevertheless, she was ignorant of what she really challenged when she challenged Earle. Hard knowledge of the true weight of Life will tell, and Earle's knowledge of that weight told now. The girl's head was downhung, so that the nodule of bone at the back of her neck caught the light sharply. Suddenly she looked up. "But you are Lord Moone's niece, aren't you?" she said, without preface. Since her vacation, this daughter of a struggling Westbourne Grove bookseller had seemed less assertive than before, and was, somehow, none the worse for it. Louie didn't know what had made the difference, but she momentarily dropped her point. "Yes," she said. "Why?" "Then----?" Richenda halted. "Then what? The other that I told them downstairs is just as true, if that's what you want to know." "But--but----" "Well, what?" Earle evidently mitigated what she had been about to say. "I only mean that--that you must have thought it queer, my talking as I did--that morning, you know?" Louie saw the approach of the first attitude for her garner. "What morning?" she demanded. "When they punished me--when I was washing the fruit trees." "I remember. Well, why should I think anything queer?" Earle's head dropped again. Again the sharp nodule of bone showed. "Do you mean," Louie said, "that if my father's what I said, no doubt I know as much about what you were saying as you do?" "Oh no!" Earle said, the more quickly that that probably had been what she had meant. "Then what do you mean?" "Only that it's--so odd----" But suddenly Louie gave her towel a twitch and turned away. She spoke with her chin over her shoulder. "I don't love my mother," she said, "but for all that she is Lord Moone's sister--Augustus Evelyn Francis Scarisbrick, Lord Moone. And the other's my father. I wouldn't study too hard about it if I were you. You have your medal to get." She walked abruptly to the bathroom.