First blood was drawn when Louie mentioned the name of Roy Lovenant-Smith. She called him, with aggravating naturalness, "Roy." Mrs. Lovenant-Smith rose nearly an inch in height. "'Roy!'" she echoed. "'Roy,' indeed!" "I quite expected Priddy would tell you that first time. Of course he would. The gardeners here don't like outsiders intruding," said Louie. The point told. There was no need to mention the name of Miss Hastings. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face deepened its ochre. "Go on, Miss Causton," she said; while Miss Harriet timidly interposed: "I think that's all you wanted me for?" Louie went on. "And anyway, you gave your nephew permission to come on the premises, which seems to me quite as much against the Rules as anything there." She pointed to the charge-sheet. "Pray go on, Miss Causton," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, swallowing her wrath. Piker Betteridge, counting the moral advantage to be more than the pain endured, had formerly been wont to thrust out his undefended jaw in order to prove its invulnerability to attack; Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was doing something of the same kind now. "Pray go on----" she said. "And of course that's all bunkum," said Louie, warming, and pointing once more to the paper in Miss Harriet's hand. "That isn't in the least what you mean. What you really hate is my having told the girls what you've had in your mind ever since I came--I mean about my father." "Pray go on!" The jaw was thrust out once more. ("Perhaps I'd better go?" Miss Harriet still fidgeted. Seedsmen's daughters are not at their ease at these Olympian conflicts.) "All right, I will go on," said Louie, warming still more. "You would have preferred me to hold my tongue about it, and if you're thinking of asking me to resign I should like to say now that probably at least half-a-dozen others will go with me." Here, however, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith scored a point. "That may have been true a little while ago," she said, "but--go on." And Louie remembered certain little incidents and unbendings that had caused it to be indulgently rumoured that "Lovey wasn't such a bad old sort once you got to know her." Louie conceded the point. "Anyway, that's what she does mean," she said, turning to Miss Harriet--"that she didn't want me to tell them that my father was a prizefighter and kept a public-house!" "Address yourself to me, if you please," ordered Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. "Certainly! You've been set against me from the first, for that very reason; and as for your nephew, I've known him for years and years, and you've no business at all to have him here, and it would sound rather well, wouldn't it, if the tale got about that you allowed----" But at this Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's hardly held composure gave way with a snap. Well-born but necessitous Ladies-in-Charge of horticultural colleges do not submit to being told their duty by the daughters of pugilists. She stamped on the floor.