.

"I'll ask father if I may have you at Carrigrohane in the summer, and
then see if you don't believe. She wears white."

"I am going out now, Kathleen; aren't you coming with me?"

"No, thank you, my love."

"You ought to, Kathleen. I am busy preparing for my scholarship
examination or I would stay and argue with you. It is an awful pity to
have gone to the expense of coming here if you don't mean to do your
utmost."

"Thank you, darling, but it is rather a waste of breath for you to talk
so long to me. I mean to be naughty this afternoon."

"I can't help you," said Alice. "I am very sorry you ever came."

"Thank you so much, dear."

Alice ran downstairs.

"Mother," she said, rushing into her mother's presence, "we shall have
no end of trouble with that terrible girl. She is lying now on the bed
with her outdoor boots on, and she won't come to school, or do a single
thing I want her to."

"The money her father pays will be very welcome, Alice. We must bear
with some discomforts on account of that."

"I suppose so," said Alice, shrugging her shoulders. "How horrid it is
to be poor, and to have such a girl as that in the house! Well, I can't
stay another minute. You had better keep a sort of general eye on her,
mother, for there's no saying what she will do. She has declared her
intention of being naughty. She knows no fear, is not guided by any sort
of principle, and would, in short, do anything."

"Well, go to school, Alice, and be quick home, for I have a great deal I
want you to help me with."

Alice made no reply, and Mrs. Tennant, after thinking for a minute, went
upstairs. She knocked at the door of the room which she had given up to
the two girls. There was no answer. She opened it and went in. The bird
had flown. There were evident signs of a stampede through the window,
for it stood wide open, and there were marks of not too clean boots on
the drugget, and a torn piece of ivy just without. The window was twenty
feet from the ground, and Kathleen must have let herself down by the
sturdy arm of the old ivy. Mrs. Tennant looked out, half expecting to
see a mangled body on the ground; but there was no one in view. She
returned to her darning and her anxious thoughts.

She was a widow with two sons and a daughter, and something under two
hundred and fifty pounds a year on which to live. To educate the boys,
to do something for Alice, and to put bread-and-butter into all their
mouths was a difficul