lightening, in Mrs. Rayner’s manner. She did not become talkative or animated like any other woman; but it was as if a statue of stone had become a statue of flesh, feeling the life in its own veins and grown conscious of the life around it. This change brought one strange symptom: she had grown nervous. Instead of wearing always an unruffled stolidity, she started at any unexpected sound, and a faint tinge of color would mount to her white face at the opening of a distant door or at a step in the passage. This change must certainly, I thought, be due to her husband’s departure; but it was hard to tell whether his absence made her glad or sorry, or whether any such vivid feeling as gladness or grief caused the alteration in her manner.

On the second day of Mr. Rayner’s absence Sarah came to the schoolroom, saying that a gentleman wished to speak to me. In the drawing-room I found Mr. Laurence Reade.

“I have come on business with Mr. Rayner; but, as they told me he was out, I ventured to trouble you with a commission for him, Miss Christie.”

“I don’t know anything about business, especially Mr. Rayner’s,” I began doubtfully. “Perhaps Mrs. Rayner—”

“Oh, I couldn’t trouble her with such a small matter! I know she is an invalid. It is only that two of the village boys want to open an account with the penny bank. So I offered to bring the money.”

He felt in his pockets and produced one penny.

“I must have lost the other,” he said gravely. “Can you give me change for a threepenny-piece?”

I left him and returned with two halfpennies. He had forgotten the names of the boys, and it was some time before he remembered them. Then I made a formal note of their names and of the amounts, and Mr. Reade examined it, and made me write it out again in a more business-like manner. Then he put the date, and wrote one of the names again, because I had misspelt it, and then smoothed the paper with the blotting-paper and folded it, making, I thought, an unnecessarily long performance of the whole matter.

“It seems a great deal of fuss to make about twopence, doesn’t it?” I asked innocently.

And Mr. Reade, who was bending over the writing-table, suddenly began to laugh, then checked himself and said—

“One cannot be too particular, even about trifles, where other people’s money is concerned.”

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