Tony Strife crept up the back stairs to the schoolroom. She paused for a moment and listened to a distant buzz of voices. Her mother must be having visitors, so she would not go near her--she would sit in the schoolroom till it was time to dress for dinner. Tony was sixteen, healthy and clean-limbed, with a thick mouse-coloured plait between her shoulders. She wore a school-girl's blouse and skirt, with a tie of her school cricket-colours. She had in her manner all the mixture of confidence and deference which points to one who is paramount in her own little world, but is for some reason cast adrift in another where she has never been more than subordinate. The schoolroom was in darkness. The fire was unlighted and the blinds were up, so that the shadows of the pines rushed over the square of moonlight on the floor, waving and gliding and curtseying in the wind. Tony, who had expected drawn blinds and a cosy fireside, was a little dismayed at the dreariness of her kingdom. "I wonder if they got my postcard," she thought forlornly. But the schoolroom was the schoolroom, with or without a fire, and her own special province now that Awdrey had grown up, and exchanged its austere boundaries for a world of calls and dances and chiffons and flirtations. It was a little bit of the glorious land of school from which she had been so abruptly exiled. For the first time since her return a certain warmth glowed in her heart--she sat down on the window-sill and looked out at the pines. She wondered how soon she would be able to go back to school. Perhaps there would be no more cases, and the clear, all-sufficient life would start again at the half-term. Meantime she would write every week to her three best friends and the mistress she "had a rave on," she would work up her algebra and perhaps get her remove into the sixth next term; and she would finish that beastly nightgown she had been struggling with ever since Easter, and be able to start a frock, like the rest of the form. Her calculations were interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the passage and a rather strident voice calling-- "Tony! Tony!" The next minute the door flew open, and a girl a few years older than herself burst in. "Hullo!--so you _are_ home! I saw your box in the hall, and swore you must have come back for some reason or other; but of course mother wouldn't believe me. What on earth have you come for?" "They've got whooping-cough at school, and Mrs. Arkwright sent us all home. Didn't mother get my postcard?" "Postcard! of course not. We'd no idea you were coming, and your room isn't ready for you, or anything. You ought to have known better than to send only a card--they get kept back for days sometimes. And when you arrived, why didn't you come into the drawing-room and see mother, instead of sneaking up here?" "I thought you had visitors--I could hear them talking. I meant to come down after I'd changed."