Kitty tossed her head. "_I_ should expect the gentleman _I_ was engaged to to take _me_ to dances," she said. "But Archie didn't say 'engaged.' Just after somebody, I should say--and don't I just vish her joy!" "It's evidently nobody at the School," mused Kitty Windus. "Archie was almost certain about that." "Vell, it isn't _me_, if you're thinking of suspecting me!" said Miss Levey merrily. "_I_ vouldn't touch him with the end of a long pole." "Chance is a fine thing, my dear," remarked Miss Windus. "Opportunity's another." (This reply, Louie had noted, was _de rigueur_.) "I expect she types or something at his place in the City." "She might be in an A.B.C. shop--no, a Lockhart's." "Or a barmaid," Kitty hinted. "Or his vashervoman." "Oh, I expect he washes his own shirts." "Perhaps he'll vash her blouses, too, whoever she is." They both laughed. Louie, her mask once more a little out of place, turned suddenly away. Little as she had been inclined to work, she was now, somehow or other, not much more inclined for amusement. She wandered into the shorthand dictation class, but in a few minutes came out again. Then she walked into the lecture-room, where some example or other had been left chalked up on the big blackboard from the last lesson. Thence she went into the typewriting-room, and back to the lecture-room again. Finally she got from the "library"--the little back room where the files and presses and gelatine copiers and a few books were kept--a number of old examination papers, and, finding a chair near the folding door that divided the lecture-room from the general-room, sat down and began to turn them over. But she thought more of the conversation she had just overheard than she did of the examination papers. It had meant, as far as she had been able to make it out, that Mr. Jeffries had told young Merridew that he was engaged, or hoped to be engaged, to somebody outside the school altogether. That sounded--odd. Of course if Mr. Jeffries said so, Mr. Jeffries ought to know; but it is a difficult matter to disbelieve your own eyes. She supposed she had no choice but to disbelieve them, but--but--there _were_ those two glances he had given at the Polly Ross girl--whom, by the way, she must learn to call by her proper name, Miss Evie Soames. Louie was perfectly certain that she had not been mistaken in the nature of those two glances. Her reason for certitude was quite unassailable. She had known what they meant for the simple reason that she had never received such looks from a man herself. Suddenly she dropped this mask of fevered amusement entirely. As she had once sat on the stile between Rainham Parva and the sea, so Louie now sat by the folding door--relaxed, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, certainly neither of her late resolute pose nor yet of study. Her mind was what she had determined it should not be if she could help it--an empty chamber for unknown devils to enter.