ers.

"I don't care. I'm going to," she said, and turned resolutely towards
Tudor Street. Kitty had been to a high school: therefore she was not
obviously shy. She asked her way frankly and easily of carman, or clerk,
or errand-boy; and though, at the door of the dingy office in a little
court off Fleet Street, her heart beat thickly as she read the
blue-enamelled words, _Girls' Very Own Friend_, her manner as she walked
into the office betrayed no nervousness, and, indeed, struck the
grinning idle office boy as that of "a bloomin' duchess."

"I want to see----" she began; and then suddenly the awkwardness of her
position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate's surname. Abruptly to
ask this grinning lout for "Aunt Kate" seemed absolutely indecorous. "I
want to see the editor," she ended.

She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an
inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words,
"Editor--Private." A low buzz of voices came to her through the door.
She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of the
_Girls' Very Own_ lay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance
company's tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still
the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh
did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more
repulsively than ever, and said: "Walk this way."

She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she
found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small
room--a very dusty, untidy room--in which stood three young men. Their
faces were grave and serious, but Kate could not forget that one of
them had laughed, and laughed _like that_. Her chin went up about a
quarter of an inch further.

"I am sorry to have disturbed you," she said severely. "I wanted to
see--to see the lady who signs herself Aunt Kate."

There was a moment of silence which seemed almost breathless. Two of the
young men exchanged a glance, but though Kitty perceived it to be
significant, she could not interpret its meaning. Then one of the three
turned to gaze out of the window at the blackened glass roof of the
printing office below. Kitty felt certain he was concealing a smile; and
the second hurriedly arranged a bundle of papers beside him.

The third young man spoke, and Kitty liked the gentle drawl, the
peculiar enunciation. The poor girl, in her Streatham seclusion, had
never b