ace.

"I say, do you always travel with these things?" The girl stood
open-mouthed, half astonished, half contemptuous.

"What things?"

Nora pointed to the toilet-table and the bed.

Connie's expression showed an answering astonishment.

"I have had them all my life," she said stiffly. "We always took our own
linen to hotels, and made our rooms nice."

"I should think you'd be afraid of their being stolen!" Nora took up one
of the costly brushes, and examined it in wonder.

"Why should I be? They're nothing. They're just like other people's!"
With a slight but haughty change of manner, the girl turned away, and
began to talk Italian to her maid.

"I never saw anything like them!" said Nora stoutly.

Constance Bledlow took no notice. She and Annette were chattering fast,
and Nora could not understand a word. She stood by awkward and
superfluous, feeling certain that the maid who was gesticulating, now
towards the ceiling, and now towards the floor, was complaining both of
her own room and of the kitchen accommodation. Her mistress listened
carelessly, occasionally trying to soothe her, and in the middle of the
stream of talk, Nora slipped away.

"It's horrid!--spending all that money on yourself," thought the girl of
seventeen indignantly. "And in Oxford too!--as if anybody wanted such
things here."

* * * * *

Meanwhile, she was no sooner gone than her cousin sank down on the
armchair, and broke into a slightly hysterical fit of laughter.

"Can we stand it, Annette? We've got to try. Of course you can leave me
if you choose."

"And I should like to know how you'd get on then!" said Annette,
grimly, beginning again upon the boxes.

"Well, of course, I shouldn't get on at all. But really we might give
away a lot of these clothes! I shall never want them."

The speaker looked frowning at the stacks of dresses and lingerie.
Annette made no reply; but went on busily with her unpacking. If the
clothes were to be got rid of, they were her perquisites. She was
devoted to Constance, but she stood on her rights.

Presently a little space was cleared on the floor, and Constance, seeing
that it was nearly seven o'clock, and the Hoopers supped at half past,
took off her black dress with its crape, and put on a white one, high to
the throat and long-sleeved; a French demi-toilette, plain, and even
severe in make, but cut by the best dressmaker in Nice. She looked
extraordinarily t