LITMIR.BIZ

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should take their holidays in the empty month of June, and his hope that those who did not do so would defer them until as late as they could. Otherwise he was, to that extent, no better off than his trade competitors.

      "Here she comes," Burnett Minor was crying as Louie entered the crowded cubicle. "I want to be here when Causton is. It's all right for Major—oh, you needn't think we don't know, Major—if you aren't actually engaged he's always about the place when you're at home—and I'm going to stalk you both with a camera and then what-d'you-call-it—blackmail him——"

      "Shut up, Minor, or I shall send you out," B. Major ordered.

      "Then I shall tell everybody who he is and shout his name through the keyhole. It's——" She moved her lips, threatening to pronounce the name there and then.

      "Sneak!" said her sister.

      B. Minor bridled.

      "I will tell them if you call me that again! Causton, have you a young man? (That means, Avez-voo un jeune homme, Pig?)"

      "Not for you to shout his name through keyholes," Louie replied, smiling.

      "No, but do tell us—have you?"

      "At my age?" said Louie mockingly, sitting down on the edge of the bed and reaching for candied fruits.

      "Go on—you're trying to wriggle out of it—have you?"

      "Hush, little girl—open your mouth——" She popped a fruit into the mouth that itself resembled an untouched fruit.

      Pigou, from the lower deck of the washstand, interposed loudly:

      "Elle a vingt-quatr'ans—elle est perdue!"

      "Uppé petite chose, avec voter Françay," commented Burnett Minor.

      "Cau-ston coiffe déjà Sainte Catherine," said the ruthless Pigou: "à vingt-quatr'ans on est déjà—pff!"

      "Non elle isn't pff—rude chose! But she'll tell me when we sleep out, because I'm going to have my mattress next to hers, sha'n't I, Causton?"

      "Mais elle vient d'promettre——"

      "—and we shall talk about all those things you always say 'Hush' when I come in—sha'n't we, Causton?"

      "Prrridd-ee!" taunted the French child: and B. Major spoke.

      "But I say, Causton, when do you take your vac.—June or September?"

      "And where shall you go?" somebody else demanded.

      "I'm going to Ireland—father's taken a house," cried a third.

      "Nobody cares where you're going! Causton, will you come home with us?"

      "No; come to Ireland with us!"

      "Well, can I come home with you? I loved that man who brought you here!" (Burnett Minor was the young woman who had loved Chaff.)

      "It wasn't Lord Moone, was it?" Macfarlane asked.

      "Or was it your father?"

      "Your cocoa, Causton," said B. Major.

      Louie had never been so run after before. She curled up among the slippered feet at the foot of the bed (there were four girls stretched upon it), and alternately stroked the hair and tweaked the ears of Burnett Minor, who had defeated Pigou in the scramble to put her head into Louie's lap. "I can have the pitch next to yours, can't I?" the child demanded, her eyes turned up and her face (to Louie) upside down. "There, you see, Pig, she says I can—so voo juste pouvez sechey-up, là."

      This sleeping out was a summer custom at Chesson's. It began with the warm weather, sometimes in June, sometimes in July. On account of the morning and evening carrying of bedding and mattresses, the "pitches" nearest the house were deemed the most desirable, and weeks ahead there was bickering about the "bagging" of them. They bickered now, and then turned to the vacations again.

      Louie listened, saying little. For her, vacations in this sense hardly existed. Vacations lose their value when you study as slackly as Louie did. It might be amusing to go home with one or other of the girls for a week or two, but on the other hand she hardly thought she would. These were the things she was both "in at" and "out of." B. Major was talking about them now. Soon she would be taking her presentation lessons; she was coming out; she had an unofficial admirer; yes, Louie saw quite plainly what B. Major's future would be. What was her own going to be? She had not the least idea. … No, she did not really want a vacation. More or fewer, there would be girls at Chesson's throughout the summer. Chesson's still amused her; she could leave once for all when it ceased to amuse her. She was learning nothing. She neither wished to start a lavender farm, as Elwell, the daughter of Sir James Elwell of the Treasury, did, nor to grow peaches, as did Macfarlane, nor to add to her pocket-money by selling pot-pourri at extravagant prices to her friends, which was Burnett Major's idea—until she should marry. She could hardly sell pot-pourri to her prize-fighting father. She might (she smiled) sell him hops—she seemed to remember that beer was made of hops. …

      And she certainly did not intend to mug at theory for the sake of a medal, as Earle was doing at this very moment. …

      The party was still discussing this life which was hers and yet not hers when Miss Harriet, going her rounds, tapped at the door and entered.

      "Bedtime, young ladies, please," she said. "Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's compliments, and she hopes you have enjoyed yourselves."

      Her tone was that of one who might say: "You see, young ladies, what liberty you have within the Rules; isn't it much pleasanter all round?"

      The party broke up.

      The weeks passed. In June a number of the girls went home, Earle among them. Permission to sleep out was given, a little earlier than usual on account of the heavy mildness of the nights; and Louie lay in the orchard, between Burnett Minor and little Pigou. The convolvulus came out, great white trumpets in the hedges; the sea over the hill became of a milky blue; and there floated out to it dense tracts of odours, lilies, and syringa, jasmine and roses and hay. You wearied of the smell of meadow-sweet; in the houses you could hardly take breath. The sun was reflected piercingly from their glass roofs, and the girls spent the afternoons in deck-chairs under the shadow of the courtyard yew.

      The thing that (Louie sometimes told herself afterwards) made all the difference and yet (as she also sometimes told herself) made no difference at all, began very trivially. It was just such another accident as that which, nine or ten years before, had sent her to her mother with a demand to be told "who the Honourable Mrs. Causton was."

      Ordinarily, the girls at Chesson's were a little careless about the dressing of their hair. You cannot move constantly among banks of plants, and pick fruit, and net cherry-trees, and be for ever stooping over beds and frames, and keep your hair fit to be seen. Therefore, once a month or so, the girls might, if they wished, go in parties of four or five to a hairdresser's at Rainham, there to be professionally—whatever the word may be. These parties were made up more with a view to the enjoyment of the half-holiday than to the business strictly in hand; and Louie, had she cared, might have been a member of each detachment that went. On this particular day Louie had had much ado to free herself from Burnett Minor's affectionate clutch.

      "Oh, do come with our lot, Causton!" B. Minor had begged. "Oh, you are rotten! You know you went with Elwell before, and with Major before that, and I do want mine properly done like yours, not just punched up the way we do it!"

      "What, like Saint Catherine?" Louie laughed.

      "Do come."

      But Louie had shaken her off.

      "He'll remember how mine's done; I was there a week ago. No, I won't come. I'm going to do some theory this afternoon."

      "Oh, what a fib! You never do theory!"

      "Well, I ought to. No, I won't come."

      "Then will you lend me your bicycle?"

      "Yes, if you like; but the others are walking, aren't they?"

      "Well,

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