Lady Connie

There Connie found Nora’s latest statement headed “List of Liabilities” Constance sat in the shadow of a plane-tree with Falloden at her feet The tea-party at Mrs. Hooper’s Lady Connie had stood entranced by the playing of Radowitz Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each other in silence Lady Connie held in her horse, feeding her eyes upon Flood Castle and its woods Herr Schwarz was examining a picture with a magnifying glass when Falloden entered Douglas knelt, looking into his father’s face, and Radowitz moved farther away

[Illustration: There Connie found Nora’s latest statement headed “List of Liabilities”]

PART I

CHAPTER I

“Well, now we’ve done all we can, and all I mean to do,” said Alice Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. “Everything’s perfectly comfortable, and if she doesn’t like it, we can’t help it. I don’t know why we make such a fuss.”

The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring day, and the windows of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were open to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just coming into blossom. Through their twinkling buds and interlacing branches could be seen grey college walls—part of the famous garden front of St. Cyprian’s College, Oxford. There seemed to be a slight bluish mist over the garden and the building, a mist starred with patches of white and dazzlingly green leaf. And, above all, there was an evening sky, peaceful and luminous, from which a light wind blew towards the two girls sitting by the open window. One, the elder, had a face like a Watteau sketch, with black velvety eyes, hair drawn back from a white forehead, delicate little mouth, with sharp indentations at the corners, and a small chin. The other was much more solidly built—a girl of seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an intelligent eye would have read as not likely to last; a complexion of red and brown tanned by exercise; an expression in her clear eyes which was alternately frank and ironic; and an inconvenient mass of golden brown hair.

“We make a fuss, my dear,” said the younger sister, “because we’re bound to make a fuss. Connie, I understand, is to pay us a good round sum for her board and lodging, so it’s only honest she should have a decent room.”

“Yes, but you don’t know what she’ll call decent,” said the other rather sulkily. “She’s probably been used to all sorts of silly luxuries.”

“Why of course, considering Uncle Risborough was supposed to have twenty-odd thousand a year. We’re paupers, and she’s got to put up with us. But we couldn’t take her money and do nothing in return.”

Nora Hooper looked rather sharply at her sister. It fell to her in the family to be constantly upholding the small daily traditions of honesty and fair play. It was she who championed the servants, or insisted, young as she was, on bills being paid, when it would have been more agreeable to buy frocks and go to London for a theatre. She was a great power in the house, and both her languid, incompetent mother, and her pretty sister were often afraid of her. Nora was a “Home Student,” and had just begun to work seriously for English Literature Honours. Alice on the other hand was the domestic and social daughter. She helped her mother in the house, had a head full of undergraduates, and regarded the “Eights” week and Commemoration as the shining events of the year.