This was Mrs. Desmond's first mistake. Unfortunately Helen's bad behaviour at subsequent interviews only served to confirm her stepmother's earliest impressions. Beneath her surface amiability Mrs. Desmond possessed a considerable spirit of obstinate determination, and, if taken the wrong way, she was not an easy person to manage. She now determined, rightly or wrongly, that her stepdaughter's rebellious temper must be conquered, and conquered with the only weapons that she herself understood how to use. Accordingly when, a few weeks after her first introduction to her father's wife, Helen came to the dull house in Bloomsbury Square that Mrs. Desmond had inherited from her aunts, and where she and her husband had fixed their abode until their future plans were matured, the wayward girl found herself in a new and hitherto undreamt-of atmosphere. The surprise caused by her novel surroundings was so great that at first it almost took away her breath and left her passive. That she, Helen, who had never learned anything save in the most desultory fashion, upon whose caprices almost all her father's arrangements had depended, and who had recognized no authority save that of her own will, should be suddenly subjected to a routine that would have been galling even to carefully brought-up children, must have seemed to the poor child a cruel fate indeed. Every hour was mapped out for her, every action was to be performed at its appointed time. Mrs. Desmond had recalled, with singular accuracy, the memories of her own school-room days, and upon these Helen's were to be modelled henceforward. From seven to eight o'clock she was to practise. At eight she breakfasted upon the orthodox bread and milk or porridge--both forms of nourishment being detested by badly brought-up Helen--in company with Mrs. Desmond's own maid, who had grown gray in her mistress's service. Breakfast over, her lessons were conned lying on her back, and at nine o'clock her governess--a forbidding-looking female, not at all of the modern type, but possessed of exactly the requirements that had been considered essential in the days of Mrs. Desmond's youth--arrived, and did not leave her pupil for a moment until the evening, when, dressed in a prim white frock and sash, Helen was expected to take her place in her stepmother's drawing-room, where, at a due distance from the fire, and with a proviso that she was to speak when spoken to, she was allowed to amuse herself with a book until the gong sounded for her parents' dinner, when she was supposed to go to bed, with Mrs. Desmond's prim maid again in attendance to put out the light.