ull, as she said,
and she loved to be gay. An invincible cheeriness of heart carried her
gallantly over the quicksands in which Ruth was submerged by reason of
her moodiness, and Trix by her quick temper, and made it a physical
impossibility to repine over the inevitable.

Fifteen-year-old Trix was in that stage when the Oxford examination
seems the end-all and be-all of existence. Her section of Attica was
proudly dubbed "The Study," and had its walls covered with maps, class
lists, and "memos" of great variety. The desk was strewn with papers
and exercise-books, and there lingered in the air that indescribable
scent of sponge, slate, indiarubber, and freshly sharpened pencils which
seem inseparable from youthful study.

Trix confessed to one weakness,--only one!--an overwhelming greed for
pencil-boxes and sharpeners, and the contents of the wooden shelf above
the desk testified to her indulgence in this craving. "The girls gave
them to me!" she used to say when strangers exclaimed at the number of
the piled-up boxes, but she blushed even as she spoke, knowing well that
to keep sixpence in her pocket and pass a pencil-box of a new design,
was a feat of self-denial beyond imagination.

Dear, chubby, placid Betty was only thirteen, and cared for nothing in
the world but her relations, chocolate-creams, and scrambling through
the day's classes with as little exertion as possible. She shivered in
her corner, poor mite, sucking audibly, to the distraction of her
elders, the while she skimmed over her lessons, and looked forward to
the time when she would be free to devote herself to the hobby of the
hour.

Sometimes it was postcards; sometimes it was stamps; sometimes it was
penny toys collected from street vendors. It had once soared as high as
autographs, and a promising beginning of three signatures were already
pasted into the remaining leaves of an exercise-book. Whatever the
collection might be, it lived in heaps on the uncarpeted floor; and when
Betty had a tidy fit, was covered with a crochet antimacassar which had
known better days, and had grown decidedly mellow in tint.

On this particular afternoon, the two younger sisters were taking tea
with school friends, while their elders enjoyed an uninterrupted _tete-
a-tete_, when they could indulge in a favourite game. When life was
unusually flat and prosaic, when the weather was wet, invitations
conspicuous by their absence, and the want of pocket-money