me! I know I deserve it. Smite hard, just as the little Nan used to do. She always got the better of me in every encounter of wits. All the same, I don't see why girls should bother themselves over exams."

"Don't you?" I said. "Then it shows a sad lack of discernment on your part. You forget that a great many women have to earn their own livelihood, and the test of an examination furnishes them with a credential which is of the utmost importance to them."

"I hold it a shame that any woman should have to work for herself!" he said hotly, and I returned with equal heat:

"And I call it a shame for man or woman not to work, and a positive sin if they waste their opportunities—"

"Ah, you have me there!" he broke in. "The cap fits, and I put it on. But, indeed, I mean to work better in the future."

"What are you going to do?" I asked, somewhat abashed by the readiness with which he took my words home.

"Oh, I have yet another chance of getting into the Artillery," he said. "I can go up again in six months' time. Meanwhile, I am working at home under the governor's supervision. There's a man at Chelmsford who is coaching me, and I go up to town for extra lessons."

We were driving rapidly across a breezy common, and, as he spoke, the wind caught my cloak and blew it across my face. He leaned forward to pull it down, and to tuck the rug more closely about me, and I caught an unusually serious look from his dark eyes as he said:

"I mean to be good now, Nan. I have promised Mrs. Lucas. She was talking to me only yesterday. She is an angel—a veritable angel, and so sad and lonely now at 'Gay Bowers.' I am glad you have come to be with her. You will cheer her."

"I should like to cheer her," I said, and then fell silent, for we were almost at "Gay Bowers," and I was beginning to dread the meeting with my aunt. Like many another young girl, I felt a morbid shrinking from any one on whom a heavy stroke of bereavement had fallen. I felt incapable of giving true sympathy, and was nervous lest I should do or say the wrong thing.

It was a story told against me at home that once, some years before, when mother sent me to carry a parcel to a poor woman who had just lost her husband, and she said to me, "Oh, miss, it's a terrible thing to be left a widow with four children—" all I could say by way of consolation was, 

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