“I go; I see you again in a year,” said Max suddenly, drawing up near the door where Mrs. Henderson stood sipping coffee with Sarah and Bennett. “Where is Burton?” he asked in the midst of his thanks and leave-taking. They all hesitated. Miriam suddenly found herself in the presence of a tribunal. Bennett’s careless “Oh, he’s gone; couldn’t stay,” followed her as she flung upstairs to Meg Wedderburn’s empty room. Why had her mother looked so self-conscious and Sarah avoided her eye ... standing there like a little group of conspirators. People were always inventing things. “Bother--damnational silliness,” she muttered, and began rapidly calculating. Ted gone away. Little Ted hurt and angry. To-morrow. Perhaps he wouldn’t come. If he didn’t she wouldn’t see him before she went. The quiet little bead of ruby shaded gas reproached her. Meg’s eyes would be sad and reproachful in this quiet neatness. Terror seized her. She wouldn’t see him. He had finished his work at the Institution. It was the big Norwich job next week. CHAPTER III 1 Miriam propped “The Story of Adèle” open against the three Bibles on the dressing-table. It would be wasteful to read it upstairs. It was the only story-book amongst the rows of volumes which filled the shelves in the big schoolroom and would have to last her for tea-time reading the whole term. The “Fleurs de l’Eloquence?” Shiny brown leather covered with little gold buds and tendrils, fresh and new although the parchment pages were yellow with age. The Fleurs were so short ... that curious page signed “Froissart” with long s’s, coming to an end just as the picture of the French court was getting clear and interesting. That other thing, “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” Fascinating. But it would take so much reading, on and on forgetting everything; all the ordinary things, seeing things in some new way, some way that fascinated people for a moment if you tried to talk about it and then made them very angry, made them hate and suspect you. Impossible to take it out and have it on the schoolroom table for tea-time reading. What had made the Pernes begin allowing tea-time reading? Being shy and finding it difficult to keep conversation going with the girls for so long? They never did talk to the girls. Perhaps because they did not see through them and understand them. North London girls. So different from the Fairchild family and the sort of girls they had been accustomed to when they were young. Anyhow, they hardly ever had to talk to them. Not at breakfast or dinner-time when they were all three there; and at tea-time when there was only one of them, there were always the books. How sensible. On Sunday afternoons, coming smiling into the schoolroom, one of them each Sunday--perhaps the others were asleep--reading aloud; the Fairchild family, smooth and good and happy, everyone in the book