PART I

RAINHAM PARVA

I

The Horticultural College at Rainham Parva, now defunct, was hardly a college in the modern sense at all. Its technical books were antiquated; it had only one or two old microscopes; and it totally lacked the newer trimmings of specialisation. Its founder, a Bristol seedsman called Chesson, had bought the place cheaply, house and all, a dozen years before, and having five hardy daughters eating their heads off at home, had, as the saying is, economically emancipated them. That meant then (whatever it may mean now) that, realising that the wages of two men and a boy might be saved, he had had them down to Rainham Parva and had set them to work.

The second Miss Chesson, Miss Harriet, had shown a real aptitude for the work. She had won, after three years, a Diploma, and this Diploma, together with the presence in the house as paying boarder of a niece of Chesson's, had put an idea into the seedsman's head--the premium idea. With the Diploma properly advertised, its grantee made Principal, a premium or so forgone (called a Scholarship) and the proper person installed over all as Lady-in-Charge, Chesson had foreseen a good deal of his work being done by young women who would pay for the privilege of being allowed to do it. There is no need to describe the development of the idea. The enterprise had prospered, and when Louie Causton had put her name down on the books and paid her fees the complement of thirty girls was full.

She did not, after all, travel down alone. Her stepfather, hinting that it was not necessary to say anything about this to her mother, made the journey with her. The pair of them shortened the hours by guessing which of the young women in the same train were to be Louie's fellow-students; and when they alighted at Rainham Magna station the Captain put Louie and her traps into one of the nondescript vehicles that only saw the light when the Rainham girls arrived or departed, and drove off with her to the college. There he shook hands with the Lady-in-Charge, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, and asked her whether she was related to Lovenant-Smith of the 24th. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's reply did not actually affirm her regret that she was so related, but the Captain's affability dried up suddenly. He was returning to town by the four-o'clock train; before doing so he took a turn round the place with Louie.

"Well," he said, as Louie took her leave of him at the gates, "it's a good growing country, I should say; rum idea of yours though.... You've heard me speak of Lovenant-Smith, haven't you? Adjutant eight or nine years ago; not a bad chap at all, _I_ should have said. She'll be one of the Shropshire lot, I expect. I knew he had people down there.... Well, mind you don't run away with a gardener. 'Bye, Mops----"

And he was off, tugging at his moustache and inwardly commenting that the whole escapade was "just like Louie."

It was a good growing country. Chesson said that the mildness of the winters was due to the Gulf Stream; Miss Harriet Chesson attributed it to ozone--ozone having been a word to conjure with at the time when she had taken her Diploma. Ozone or Gulf Stream, it provided wild violets in December, lemon-verbena that grew in trees up the sides of the cottages and had to be cut away from the upper windows, and filled the deep lanes with the hart's-tongue fern. It also brought forth rich produce. The dairy business and poultry farm flourished; crates and parcels and returned empties kept the goods clerk at Rainham Magna station busy; and, when the heather bloomed on the hill that rose between Chesson's and the sea, the "Rainham Heather Honey," green as bronze and thick as glue, was at a premium. At the crest of the hill the seedsman's estate ended. Beyond that, dropping abruptly to the west, lay deep wooded coombes, green to the very rocks of the shore.

Louie's age put her at once out of the class of the "new girl" who, in the school tales, sits pathetically on her box and waits for somebody to speak to her. She was twenty-four, and probably only one other student, the copper-haired girl with the long thin neck and the "salt-cellars" showing through her white flannel blouse, who asked her her number and offered to show her the way to her cubicle, was more than twenty-two. Her large black feathered hat (see the first part of the Captain's advice as to how she would make the most of herself), and her expensively simple navy blue coat and skirt down to her toes, further distinguished her among the tweed jackets and ankle-length skirts of the younger girls. No doubt she had her perfect management of these and her numerous other garments from her mother's former interest in the study of Drapery. If the Captain did not think her face pretty, it must be remembered that the Captain had standards of prettiness of his own. Pretty in the professional-beauty sense her irregular mouth and long chin perhaps were not. Her large, clear, pebble-grey eyes at any rate were arresting.

The copper-haired girl, having shown Louie her cubicle, offered to show her the rest of the house also. They began upstairs on the first floor, where the girls slept. The place was an old mansion in the form of a hollow square, and as they came to each latticed embrasure Louie stopped to look at the famous Rainham yew that almost filled the grassgrown inner courtyard. The corridors were dark, and sudden steps where no steps were to have been expected made of the uneven floors a series of booby-traps for those not familiar with them. Memories of the Monmouth Rebellion seemed to linger round the corners and to be shut up in the cupboards of the place. They passed downstairs. Through the doorway of the handsome Restoration façade they saw the yew again, dark beyond the shining flags of the hall. Louie had already been in the reception-room and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's private apartments on the right of the doorway; on the left, she was told, were the quarters of Miss Harriet (who alone of Chesson's daughters remained there) and the staff. The domestics slept at the top of the house; the four male gardeners (all married) occupied the farm a furlong away at the back.

"But wouldn't you like some tea?" said the copper-haired girl. "It's in the dining-room."

"I was told to report myself to Miss Chesson at five," said Louie, looking at her watch.

"Well, you've just time, if you're quick----"

They sought the room where the housekeeper ran cups of tea from the tap of a large and funereal bronze urn.

It was ten minutes to five when Louie entered the dining-room. Before the clock had struck five she had taken a certain position in the college.

She herself hardly knew how it happened. The room was full of noise and chatter, and near Louie, talking louder and making more noise than anybody else, was a lanky child of sixteen, to be a tall blonde beauty in another three or four years' time, but so far only a mass of unadjusted proportions and movements that lacked co-ordination. She had several distinct voices, and in one of these she was now engaged in unabashed mimicry. Louie, who had got her cup of tea, heard a bell-like "_Os_-trich feathers!" and she was about to put a question to the copper-haired girl when, with a mock reverence and an explosive "Your _Ma_-jesty!" the child swept backwards into her. She barely saved her cup of tea. The girl gave a quick turn; her "Clum----" was changed to a "Sorry!" as she saw a new face, and Louie smiled.

"Your feet were all wrong," Louie said.

The blonde child turned eagerly again.

"Can you do it?" she asked.

The next moment, before Louie could get out "A drawing-room curtsy? Yes," the child had cried: "Girls! Girls! Here's somebody who knows how to do it! Do come and show us!"

"Really?" said Louie, smiling, and handing her cup of tea to the copper-haired girl.

"Yes--come here, Rhoda, and watch (that's my sister--she's to be presented, you know)."

Louie laughed. "Quickly then--I have to see Miss Chesson----"

And, pushed unceremoniously forward, and still in her feathered hat and navy blue costume, Louie made her first bow to her fellow-students at Chesson's in the deep and swanlike genuflexion she had practised with her cousin, Cynthia Scarisbrick, a couple of years before. Then she ran out, smiling.

"_How_ ripping!" she heard somebody say as she did so. "I expect she's been presented."

Louie sought Miss Harriet.

The Principal, a businesslike, damson-complexioned woman of forty-five, with a deerstalker hat on her close-cropped curly hair, asked her what course of study she proposed to take. Louie replied (in other words) that all courses were the same to her. Miss Harriet had had that kind of student before. She asked a few further questions, and then put Louie down for the elementary course. She dismissed her with a marked syllabus and a copy of the Rules.

Louie read the Rules, nodded, as much as to say, "I thought so!" and then laughed. There was no need to ask who had drawn them up; she remembered the frigid way in which Chaff had been put into his place that afternoon. There was a serenity about them that transcended the ordinary imperative mood. "_Students do not absent themselves from Morning Prayers or Divine Service without Permission._" "_Students do not give Orders to the Gardeners or Domestics._" "_Students do not pass beyond the Bounds of the College (Map appended)._" If on occasion students did all of these things, that did not detract from the _largior ether_ in which the Rules were conceived.

Nor did mere evidence to the contrary ever in the least degree abate Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's persuasion that the young ladies of Chesson's, being the daughters of gentlefolk, were by that very fact almost to be trusted to do without Rules at all.

On the following morning Louie, with leggings of doe-skin buttoned to her knees (see the second of the Captain's recommendations for the attire that suited her best), and wearing a wide-pocketed jacket not unlike a man's, began the practical study of Horticulture.

II

She was attached to the "posse" of six girls of which the copper-haired student, whose name was Richenda Earle, was the head. This girl, as the holder of the scholarship mentioned a page or two back, was the single non-fee-paying student in the place. Her father was a bookseller in Westbourne Grove, and she had kept his books for him before coming to Chesson's. She had picked up her knowledge of book-keeping at an obscure and ill-appointed Business School in Holborn, but, her health being anything but robust, she had taken up gardening under the impression that it was an out-of-doors pursuit. It was only this at Chesson's to a strictly limited extent. Whatever students did or did not learn, the output for the market had to be maintained, and this necessitated, for days and days together, work in the twelve long glass-houses, from the humid heat of which the girls came out limp and listless and relaxed. Richenda Earle suffered from these depressions more than most of them, and now only remained at the college because Miss Harriet had held out hopes for her of a place on the staff. She was easily head of all the classes of which she was a member, but was hopelessly incapable of making her personality felt. Add to all this that she was avid of popularity, and that her self-consciousness took the form of making her more assertive (without being a bit more effective) than any girl in the college, and you will see why Louie felt a little sorry for her without taking to her very much. She for her part had fastened herself on Louie from the start, and had been the first to put the question that Louie had had to answer a dozen times before she had been at Chesson's two hours.

"No, I haven't been presented," Louie had said, finding herself waylaid almost at the door of Miss Harriet's room as she had come out again. "My cousin has; that's where I learned it. We practised it together."

"I've seen them go in," Richenda had murmured, a little wistfully, a little dully; "the carriages and things, you know. I live in London."

Thereupon she had volunteered some of the information stated above, as if inviting a confidence in return. "I'm glad you're in my posse," she had concluded, as Louie had turned away without giving any information whatever about herself.

The remaining members of "Earle's posse" were the two Burnett sisters ("B Major," the girl who was to be presented, and "B Minor," the sixteen-year-old beauty-to-be), a Scotch girl called Macfarlane, and one other girl, half French, Beatrice Pigou. There were four other posses at the college, and each was told off each day to put itself under the direction of one or other of the four gardeners, to pot, "prick out," water or whatever the task might be. The gardener at present in charge of Louie's posse was a sullen young Apollo called Priddy, whose face and neck and forearms ozone or the Gulf Stream had turned to the hue of some deep and old and mellow violin; and Burnett Minor and the younger girls, talking in terms of the life to which their eyes were yet sealed, discussed Priddy with a freedom perfectly innocent and entirely appalling.

Louie had not been at Rainham Parva two days before she was wondering whether after all she wanted to stay. She didn't know really why she had come. Not one of the three commonest reasons for girls being there--a stepmother, to be able to earn a little pocket-money, or to get over a youthful love-affair--quite fitted her case. And then there were those ridiculous Rules. She supposed that if she stayed she would be on the same footing as the juniors, and she hardly thought she could submit to that. Not that the Rules did not seem to justify themselves; on the contrary, they did. Merely because Mrs. Lovenant-Smith affirmed that students did not do this or that, students as a matter of fact either did not do these things, or else consented to class themselves as transgressors when they did.

But Louie's own attitude in the face of a prohibited thing, inherited from her mother and now made inveterate by her upbringing, was invariably that of a wonder what would happen were the prohibition to be disregarded.

It was just a wonder, nothing more.

Then, on the night of her third day at Chesson's, she made up her mind to forfeit her fees and leave in the morning. The reason for her decision was this:

During the vacation certain digging had been allowed by the gardeners to fall into arrears; and Earle's posse, together with another set of six girls, had been set to do it. Now digging was the hardest work the girls were ever called upon to do, and at the beginning of the term at any rate they were spared it as much as possible. But education or output required that this digging should be done, and accordingly the twelve girls had digged for the whole morning, and in the afternoon had varied the labour by carrying heavy pots from House No. 6 to House No. 10--a distance of perhaps sixty yards. The next morning twelve girls (or rather eleven, for Burnett Minor's unset muscles had suffered but little) were half incapacitated by stiffness, and that night there was an outcry for hot baths and arnica. Louie, clad in dressing-gown and slippers and carrying her soap and sponge and towel, hobbled to the bathrooms, and came, in the box-room, upon an indignation-meeting.

This box-room was the common meeting-ground for students who awaited their turns at the baths. It lay over the back courtyard arch, and the four bathrooms adjoined it, two on either side. It was piled almost to the ceiling with trunks and boxes and dress-baskets, the white initials of which glimmered in the shadows cast by a couple of candles on the floor; but there were isolated boxes enough to make seats for the seven or eight girls already assembled there. They had slippers on their naked feet and single garments on their aching bodies; and on one of Louie's own boxes Burnett Major was peering at the little blue flame of a spirit-kettle and mixing in a row of cups the paste for that beverage of revolt--cocoa. Burnett Minor had traitorously turned the general righteous anger to private account, had "bagged" the hottest bath, and was now carolling at the top of her lungs in the right-hand bathroom.

"----then if Earle won't do it I vote we draw lots!" Macfarlane was exclaiming shrilly as Louie opened the door. "Those lazy louts of gardeners are supposed to have all the digging done before we come up----"

They were not--not if Chesson knew it; but "Of course they are!" cried five voices at once.

"Well, I'm just not going to stand it--there----"

"And I'm not----"

"Nor me----"

"And for two pins I'd tell Priddy so!"

There was a moment's silence, but only because, all having spoken at once, all had to take breath at once.

"It's abominable----"

"Disgusting----"

"Celà m'embête----"

"Here's Causton--what do _you_ vote, Causton?" they cried, turning to her.

"What about?" Louie asked.

"Why, everything, of course--this beastly place--and setting us to dig the first week--and Priddy's beastly cheek----"

Then every tongue was unloosed.

"_And_ a row every time we want an extra blouse washed----"

"_And_ washing two guineas a term extra----"

"_And_ only the vuggles for dinner that aren't good enough for the market----" ("Vuggles" were vegetables.)

Another pause for breath.

"Let's what-d'-you-call-it--strike----"

Louie laughed as she sat stiffly down by Burnett Major.

"Oh, I'll vote for anything you like; I don't care," she said.

Then they began anew.

"Earle's head of the posse--_she_ ought to do it----"

Richenda Earle's voice broke in in loud complaint.

"How _can_ I? You know I would like a shot if it wasn't for my scholarship. But I should just be told that if I didn't like it I could go. Elwell's head of your lot. Elwell ought to go."

"I don't care who goes, but I will _not_ be told to do things by Priddy."

"Priddy!----"

(Louie smiled again as there came from the bathroom the joyful voice:

"_Early one mo-o-orning--as the su-un was a-rising!_----")

"And those pots hadn't got to be moved--he was only making work----"

"--gros tyran!----"

"--like they kept us three weeks grading and packing tomatoes last autumn, and called it 'study'----"

"--and the bruised ones for us----"

"--not even fit for ketchup----"

"--Dothegirls Hall _this_ establishment ought to be called!----"

Another momentary pause: then:

"--let's all sign a petition----"

"--no, a what-d'you-call-it--an ultimatum----"

"--just telling them straight----"

"Your bath, Earle----"

From the bathroom had come the gurgle of escaping water. Boiled pink, turbaned with her towel, smelling of somebody else's scented soap and radiating unrepentance that Earle's bath must be a tepid one, Burnett Minor bounced in.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, do lend me a dry towel, just to finish with. Oh, Causton, the curtsy, now that I've something loose on! Crocks! My cocoa, Major, and who said Priddy just now? 'Students do not fall in love with Priddy.' (I sha'n't hush.) Sugar, Mac, and, Causton, I wish you'd do my hair your way, just to see how it looks----"

And, twirling twice in the midst of a corolla of pink cashmere dressing-gown, she sank to the floor and began to nurse a chilblain on her heel.

Louie, her hands behind her head, leaned back and watched the scene with the greatest amusement. A master-rebel herself, she knew that here was no rebellion. The meeting, like other meetings, was merely letting off steam, and the girls who "wouldn't stand it" would be standing it exactly the same on the morrow. Well, on the morrow she herself would be off. Her boxes were only half unpacked; half-an-hour would put the other things back again. Already she saw that this Chesson's was an imposition. In the meantime, the indignation meeting was very amusing. She felt almost motherly towards these tractable revolutionaries. Her indulgence became still greater as they spoke out again.

"Another thing," a girl of Elwell's posse demanded; "why couldn't I go to Rainham yesterday to have my photograph taken?"

("Break the camera," Burnett Minor murmured to the chilblain.)

"And just because somebody'd bagged my boots and I was five minutes late the other day----"

"Je m'en fiche pas mal----" Pigou began.

("Parly Angly, voo affectay feele," from Burnett Minor.)

"I should like to see one of the gardeners at home looking at us the way Priddy does----"

"Or Miss Harriet either for that matter--she's only a sort of forewoman----"

"--applewoman----"

"--tomatoes----"

"--that's all she is really----"

"--nothing else----"

Louie laughed outright. Another gurgle had come from the bathroom, and Earle reappeared. Her announcement that the water was now cold added to the general sense of wrong.

"Not even enough hot water!"

"Scarcely a drop, ever!----"

"Odious!"

"Then will somebody come into my cubicle and rub me--not you, B Minor."

("Just give a squint out of the window, Elwell.")

("It's all right. Her lights are out. Lovey's too.")

"Well, I _won't_ have a cold bath, to please Lovey or anybody else!"

Nor did Louie want one. She had risen. She moved to the window that looked out over the courtyard yew--the window from which watch was kept to see when Miss Harriet and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith retired--and yawned. In the middle of her yawn she suddenly laughed again.

"Good gracious!" she thought. It was too amusing.

Suddenly Richenda Earle, who also was standing by the window, spoke to her. Evidently Richenda did not think she had been fairly treated by the meeting.

"Do _you_ think they ought to ask me to?" she complained.

Louie turned.

"To ask you to what?"

"To complain to Miss Harriet--me, the only Scholarship girl."

Louie shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. "Oh, they won't complain to Miss Harriet!"

"No--but one doesn't like to refuse things----" Earle said in injured tones.

Before Louie would have had time to reply to this, had she thought of replying to it, a diversion occurred. Nobody had heard steps approaching, but all at once the door opened, and Authority, in the person, not of Miss Harriet, but of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith herself, stood looking in. The hubbub ceased as the boiling of a kettle ceases when cold water is poured in. Several of the conspirators rose to their feet; Burnett Minor, making no bones about it, bolted behind a box. Great is even the look of Authority; it was almost a superfluity when Mrs. Lovenant-Smith asked in measured tones from the doorway: "What is the meaning of this?"

Already the tails of two dressing-gowns had vanished out of the other door.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Lovenant-Smith asked again.

Then she looked round to see on whom to fasten her displeasure.

Louie saw her look, and instantly fathomed its purpose. She and Richenda Earle stood by the window, as it were the dramatic centre of some Rembrandtesque composition to which all else was merely contributory. The Scholarship girl was going to get into a row. She, Louie, had lived for years among rows; and was leaving anyway on the morrow.

Before the "Miss Earle" had passed Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's lips Louie had stepped forward.

"We've been waiting for our baths," she said.

Perhaps already Mrs. Lovenant-Smith would have preferred Richenda Earle to Louie; there is expediency even in Authority; but the challenge, if it was that, was a public one. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith turned to Louie.

"Do you know what time it is?" she asked freezingly.

It pleased Louie to take Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's question _au pied de la lettre_.

"I'm afraid my watch is in my cubicle. I could tell you in a moment," she said.

This the Lady-in-Charge saw fit to ignore. She drew her own watch from her belt.

"It is ten minutes past eleven," she said. "Students are not out of bed at ten minutes past eleven. Neither are candles burning. Miss Earle----"

But again Louie interposed. After all, it was rough on the Scholarship girl.

"Miss Earle came in only a moment ago to send us to bed," she affirmed, without a tremor.

"Then," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, turning to Louie, and perhaps feeling herself once more headed off, "you, Miss Causton, as a new student, are perhaps not yet familiar with the Rules. Be so good as to come to me at ten o'clock to-morrow morning and I will explain them to you."

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith did not make the discomfited rebels file out past her. She herself retired with dignity. Students do not linger in the box-room when it is made known that they are expected to go to bed at once.

But no sooner had the door closed on Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's back than the pent-up general breath escaped again in a fluttering exhalation. In it were awe, delight, homage.

"Oh, Causton!" somebody breathed. "You _are_ a brick!"

"_Isn't_ she?"

"Wasn't it stunning of her?"

"You'd have caught it, Earle!"

"I saw it in her eye!"

"But I say, Causton, you'll get a wigging!"

"She didn't speak to you, you know!"

"You cut in----"

Louie felt quite confused, so much did they make of so little.

"Good gracious," she said, "what are you all talking about? That's nothing, especially as I was thinking of leaving in any case to-morrow."

There was consternation in the box-room. Had Rebellion found its leader only to lose her again immediately?

"Leaving!"

"Oh, I sha'n't leave till after ten o'clock now, you may be sure," Louie laughed.

"But--oh, I _say_!"

The dismayed voices dropped. There was a blank silence. It was only after half-a-minute that Burnett Minor, who had issued from cover again, begged: "Don't leave, Causton."

"Oh, I shouldn't leave because of anything like this," said Louie, enormously amused at the thought. "The place is a fraud--that's why I should leave."

"Oh, don't leave," another girl begged.

"Well, we'll see what she says to-morrow."

"She can't be _too_ down on you----"

"Not the first time----"

Something that can only be described as a pleasant hardening came into Louie's grey eyes. Her laugh dropped a note. She looked at the adoring faces.

"That's just what I mean," she said. "If she _is_----"

"What?----"

"I'll stay."

And that also her stepfather would have described as "just like Louie."

III

Punctually at ten o'clock on the morrow Louie knocked at the door of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's office or drawing-room--it was both--and entered. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was writing at an escritoire that was not big enough to accommodate her elbows, and so supported her braceleted wrists only. There was something contradictory about her attitude. Its rectitude as she sat at the inconvenient little desk suggested that she expected Louie, her turn, pause and inquiring "Well?" that she did not. Louie's observant eyes had already noticed a curious inconsistency about the Lady-in-Charge. A great number of things seemed to lie on the tip of her tongue, ready, apparently against her own better judgment, to be detached from it by a perfectly-timed fillip of opposition.

And Louie had only to remember the word or two with which she had dashed Chaff's affability to be fairly sure that though cocoa and candles in the box-room at eleven o'clock at night might seem a good enough reason for the present interview, as like as not another lay behind it. She stood just within the door.

"Well, Miss Causton?"

"I think you told me to come here at ten o'clock."

"Ah, yes. Please to wait a moment."

Louie listened to the squeaking of her quill and the faint jingling at her wrists as she continued to write.

When Mrs. Lovenant-Smith turned again it was almost as if she had thought better of something or other--say of an encounter with this long-chinned, grey-eyed girl who stood, not dressed for gardening, but in a long grey morning frock, looking at her from the door.

"I merely wished to impress on you, Miss Causton, that the Rules must be observed," she said. "I believe there is a copy of them on the smaller bureau by your right hand there. Take it and be so good as to study it. That is all I wished to say."

Louie did not believe the last sentence, but no disbelief showed in her eyes. She inclined her head, but watched Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, waiting for more. She thought that if she waited more would come. It did. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, having just dismissed Louie, rescinded the decision by speaking again.

"You are older than the others," she said, "and it ought not to be too much to expect of you that you will set a good example."

Louie, perhaps gratuitously, read a meaning into the words. Perhaps you guess what it was. Many of the older people of her world still remembered her mother's first marriage, and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, though Louie did not like the look of her, was still undeniably of her world. With Louie herself the drawing-master theory of her paternity had long since gone by the board; the girl had not rested until she had discovered that her father was Buck Causton, pugilist and artists' model, none other; and if Mrs. Lovenant-Smith had ever chanced to hear of her as Louise Chaffinger, and identified that person under the name which (whether from pride, spleen, sensitiveness or what not) she had since reassumed, there would probably be something very near the tip of her tongue indeed. And just as Buck had always been a pale fighter, so Louie's own mixed blood, though it might surge at her heart, left her cheeks untinged in moments of stress. She still stood, making no motion to go.

"I don't think I quite follow you," she said slowly. "Why do you say that something 'ought not to be too much to expect'?"

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith stiffened and drew in again.

"It is not necessary to follow me," she said. "You will find all that is necessary in the Rules. You may keep that copy; Rule 6 is the one I wish especially to call your attention to. Would you be so good as to pass me that bell as you go out--the small brass one on the cabinet there?"

She half turned to her writing again.

("Good gracious, what next!" thought Louie.)

The bell was a small Dutch figure in a metal farthingale, and Louie passed it. As she did so she glanced at the hand that took it. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face was wrinkled like a dried apple, and the hand, though beautifully kept, was wrinkled too, and had, moreover, rather stumpy nails. Louie's own hands were exquisite. The bell passed from hand to hand.

Whether or not it was the glance at the hands, suddenly the word too much dropped from the tip of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's tongue. She put the bell down with a little clap.

"The Rules of the college are not called into question," she said. "So far they have proved quite sufficient for the kind of student the college was founded for. By the way, why are you not dressed for the gardens?"

("'Kind of student'--good--gracious!" Louie cried in astonishment to herself. "Very well, madam----")

She spoke calmly, looking modestly down at her long cashmere skirt, but taking in her lovely hands (which toyed with the copy of the Rules) on the way.

"My dress?" she said. "Oh, I wasn't sure whether I should be staying or not."

Louie knew perfectly well that her leaving would make, at any rate until her cubicle should be filled again, a difference of something like sixty pounds a year, with extras, to Chesson's. That is rather a lot of money to hang upon a mere breach of Rule 6. Perhaps Mrs. Lovenant-Smith betrayed herself in the quickness with which she took her up.

"Do you mean you're thinking of leaving?" she asked.

Louie, who had lifted her eyes for a moment, dropped them demurely again.

"I mean," she replied, "that I didn't know whether _you_ were going to dismiss _me_ or not. You see, you may not want my--kind of student. I'd rather not be in any way considered as an exception," she added.

Had Mrs. Lovenant-Smith known Louie better she would have known that she had now no intention whatever of leaving. As it was, there probably came into her head the thought that after all Louie was a Scarisbrick and a niece of Lord Moone. Ladies-in-charge of horticultural colleges do not fall foul of the Honourable Emily and Lord Moone. All at once her severity relaxed--but she hated Louie thenceforward that it must be so. She smiled a little, but the smile had a twitch in it.

"I don't think we need go quite to that extreme, Miss Causton," she said. "All the same, I'm afraid the Rules are necessary."

"I dare say," said Louie.

"And so long as that is understood, that is the chief thing. In regard to candles in particular, in an old place like this there is always the danger of fire. In fact, I'm not at all sure that a fire drill ought not to be instituted. May I add that I quite appreciated the chivalrous way in which you tried to shield Miss Earle last night? Indeed, I wanted to say that quite as much as the other. I think that is all. Good-morning, Miss Causton."

"Good-morning," said Louie, stalking out.

As she crossed the Restoration hall, "'Kind of student'--good gracious!" she exclaimed again. "To talk to me as if I were Burnett Minor! 'Kind of student!'--I wonder it doesn't occur to her that somebody might have told me all about Miss Hastings and that gardener four years ago!--'Kind of student,' indeed!"

Still without changing her clothes, she walked out past the orchards, up the hill, and sat looking down over the coombes to the sea.

Leave Chesson's, now? Oh no, nothing was farther from her thoughts! She would stay, and why? Not because she had been treated as a junior, but because she had been taken, as it were, at her own word. She herself might be perversely and nonchalantly cynical about her mixed birth, but she did not intend to allow anybody else--Mrs. Lovenant-Smith or anybody--to show as much as a flicker of consciousness of it. "Kind of student"!--Oh no, that amusement was going to be Louie's own private preserve.

For it had been her cynical amusement. Approximately, the mood took her once in five or six months, with or without occasion. Her mother knew its times and seasons, and its passings into abeyance, not into extinction. She did not call her sensitiveness morbid; quite on the contrary, she saw to it that it took the form of a pose of gaiety; she could be pitilessly gay with herself. Meek, harmless Cynthia Scarisbrick, for example, could have told tales about her gaiety when, not knowing whether she herself was eligible for presentation or not (but gathering from the tense silence on the subject that had reigned at Trant that she was not, or at any rate that her mother did not wish it), she had practised the ceremonial curtsy with her cousin. It had been Cynthia, not Louie, who had shed the tears.

But to be agreed with by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith that her origin was open to question (for the Lady-in-Charge had all but said that)--oh no, that was really too much!----

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, who took a seedsman's salary!

She might have known that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith would know all, all about her----

Then, as she sat, she began to wonder where she had heard the name of Lovenant-Smith before. She had wondered it when first she had received her prospectus at Trant. Of course her stepfather knew these other Lovenant-Smiths, the adjutant's lot, and had probably spoken of them, but she did not think it was that. For a minute or two she sought in her memory....

She was ceasing to think when the recollection came of itself. It was only a trifling one after all. One of the boys with whom she had romped at Mallard Bois--Roy she had called him then--had been, she now remembered, a Lovenant-Smith. He would be a connection of the adjutant's. Of course, she had heard the name at Mallard Bois....

Then Louie bit her lip. If there had been any doubt at all that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith knew the story of Buck there was none now. The association with Mallard Bois was quite enough....

Louie was glad she had looked insolently at those stumpy hands....

Beast!

The trees below her tossed restlessly, and far out the grey sea was whitecapped as if it had been rasped with a file. No boat had put out for the pollock-fishing or to lift a spiller that morning; only a pilot, a couple of miles out in the Channel, slowly lifted her nose for a moment and then hid it again. Louie felt a little cold, and rose. She made an attractive picture as she did so. Her brown hair was tossed by the wind, and her long grey skirt cracked behind her and clipped her limbs almost as if she had worn the garments of a man.

"Beast!" she muttered again.

Then she thought of another beast--this father of hers whose name she had not needed to take but had taken out of rancour against her mother and despite against herself. (But not for Mrs. Lovenant-Smith to turn up her nose at!) He now (she had this from Chaff) kept a public-house somewhere up the Thames--Lord Moone's cast-off brother-in-law in a public-house!--and any fitful romantic light that might ever have shone about him was now extinguished. Of course the Captain had uttered his usual wistful formula: "Not a bad fellow at all, I should have said"; but that was rather a criticism on the Captain than on Buck. Yes. Buck was simply another beast. But though he were a potman, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith should give him every bit as much deference as if he had been a brewing peer....

"And I don't care--if it _is_ the pride of the cobbler's dog, I'm going to keep his name," Louie muttered.

Suddenly she turned and climbed the stile that led back to Chesson's land. As she did so she realised that she had been out of bounds. She laughed curtly. Rule 3! Much she cared for their Rules! What about the Rule: "Miss Hastings does not elope with What's-his-Name the gardener"?--but that would keep. In the meantime she would change into her gardening clothes before lunch. She had shown Mrs. Lovenant-Smith that she had garments of freedom. The next time Louie threatened to leave she might be able to add to the force of the threat that she would take half-a-dozen girls with her.

Well, lunch was in half-an-hour; she had just time to change.

But as she descended through the orchards again she came upon Richenda Earle. The copper-haired girl was washing an espaliered plum-tree, and as she turned her head Louie saw that she had been crying. She asked Louie if she was going.

"Leaving here, do you mean? No. What's the matter?"

The girl turned her eyes away.

"Thanks awfully for last night," she grunted. "It was ripping of you. But you see it hasn't made much difference."

"How, not made much difference?"

Richenda glanced at the tree, and from the tree to the syringe in her hand and the pail of disinfectant at her feet. "This," she said. "Anybody can do this job, and I've been sorting out pots over there all the morning," she indicated the yard behind the trees where the flower-pots and debris were kept. "And _I_ can't threaten to leave."

"Your scholarship, of course?"

"Yes. And I'm supposed to be working for the medal."

Chesson's wanted a Horticultural Society's medal badly. They had never had one, nor were likely to get one unless Richenda Earle got it for them. Louie, who was quickly fathoming the real economy of the place, looked again at Richenda's red eyes.

"Well, they won't send you away till you've failed," she said.

But Earle made an impatient gesture, and her eyes began to stream again.

"Oh, what's a girl like you know about it!" she broke out. "Yes, I know they'll keep me till then, but you don't know anything at all about it! You would if you'd had my upbringing! You don't know what the struggle is. You think digging and carrying pots is hard work; you wouldn't if you'd seen what I've seen! When you go to London it's just shopping and theatres and suppers and things; but just you try to keep a small bookseller's accounts for him, when they're hardly worth keeping, I mean, and collecting his debts when all his money's tied up in stock and your father's nearly bankrupt--not that he's ever solvent--you'd know what I meant then!"

Then the unexpected outbreak stopped suddenly.

Louie stood silently staring. She disliked seeing anybody cry. Richenda's words had little meaning for her; she supposed they contained a hidden meaning somewhere. Then the copper-haired girl went on, more quietly but no less bitterly:

"I should get a hundred pounds a year on the staff here," she said, "that is, if they won't waste me half-days just out of spite, like they're doing this morning. That's nothing to you. You others are here just for pocket-money, but we live on your pocket-money. I suppose I oughtn't to have come here at all. Not among all you. But I begged father to let me. Father once apologised to me--that was when there was a distraint out against him, if you know what that is--because he wasn't rich. Fathers ought all to be rich, he said. There are seven of us girls at home, and only one married. Oh, I tell you, you don't know!"

Louie wondered why she preferred Richenda Earle loud and striving for the popularity she never got to Richenda Earle unburdening herself thus. She herself went brightly masked, and disliked to see another's mind naked. Richenda's mind was stripped now. It was distasteful. Somehow or other Richenda contrived to miss both the balm of popularity and the solace of private sympathy.

"I'm--I'm awfully sorry," Louie said awkwardly and a little stiffly.

At the tone Richenda drew in instantly.

"It doesn't matter," she said, compressing her lips and beginning to straighten her hair. "I shall just have to buck up, that's all. But girls of your class don't know anything about it, so you needn't think you do. There's the first gong. Come on."

As they passed the dairies a rabble of students raced past the end of the house on their way to the boot-lockers. Louie and Richenda entered by the side door. Richenda plunged at once into the scramble for house-slippers, but Louie, not having put on her garden boots that day, did not need to change. It was too late now to put on another dress. She waited by the inner door.

Suddenly she was spied by Burnett Minor. The child rushed towards her, a book in her hand.

"Are you going, Causton?" she shouted.

There was a loud "Ssssh!" They could be heard from the dining-room. The girls flocked round Louie, and hoarse, excited whispers broke out:

"Are you going?"

"She's dressed!"

"Are you going?"

"Did you see her?"

"Does Causton say she's going?"

"Ssssh--not all at once!----"

"No, I'm not going," said Louie.

Mouths gaped their very widest to make up for the inaudibility of the cheers.

"Hooray!"

"Is she going?"

"No, she's not going--hooray!"

Burnett Minor threw her book joyfully into the book-locker. Ordinarily her reading varied between an adoration of Tennyson and mocking and dramatic declamations either from the "Pansy Library," or from its brother-classics, of which the typical burlesque is "The Blood-stained Putty-knife, or The Plumber's Revenge." But this book was her album.

"I saw you come down dressed, and I did want you to put something in it if you were going," she whispered gleefully; "but you're not going! Hoo----"

Her voiceless mouth gaped wider than them all.

That midday Louie walked demurely up to Mrs. Lovenant-Smith at the head of the table and apologised for not yet having changed. From her tone Mrs. Lovenant-Smith may or may not have inferred that she had spent the hours since their interview in contrite meditation. She inclined her head graciously. But Louie, taking her place for grace between Burnett Minor and Richenda Earle, was murmuring to herself once more:

"'Class of student,' indeed!... Good gracious me!..."

IV

Louie quickly became the most popular girl in the college.

* * * * *

Her studies she pursued very much as who should say: "I am Louie Causton--take it or leave it." Neither Miss Harriet nor the gardeners could ever tell when she was interested in a lesson; if she learned, she concealed her processes. Before April was out--(the intervening time may be slipped over; the daily work in the gardens and houses went on as usual, the usual number of crates and parcels was despatched from Rainham Magna station, and already the girls were looking forward to June, which was always a slack month)--before April was out she could "slip" and "bud" as deftly as any when she chose; but few made more mistakes than she, and none accepted correction with her remarkable nonchalance. Afternoon "theory" she had begun to cut almost entirely. A slate hung in the hall, on which students were supposed to write down where they might be found when they left the immediate precincts of the college. One day towards the end of April there appeared on this slate: "Gone to Rainham; L. Causton." Then she awaited events with Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.

There were no events.

She sent to Trant for a bicycle.

Truth to tell, as the spring advanced she needed the air. The glass-houses, with their smell of musk and mould and heated pipes and cherry-pie all mingled, oppressed her; the long forcing-house, where for the time being most of the work for the markets went on, completely took the starch out of her. She felt as if she was being forced herself. She hated the sight of the twelve houses; they merely meant so much ventilation, so much shutting-down for the evenings, so much watering, so much lassitude for the girls, so much money in Chesson's pocket. She was glad she had sent for the bicycle. Somebody else might read thermometers and close down and sprinkle floors and ply the hissing hoses. Louie wanted air.

Yet even the outer air was not sharp enough. It is not an invigorating air in which the lemon-verbena grows in trees up the cottage walls and scented geranium flourishes out-of-doors like a common hedge plant. In the sunken lanes through which she idled on her bicycle the primroses, twice as big as she had ever seen them, and the cowslips, great sub-tropical clusters, were already past; and she expected to see the roses out presently, big as sunflowers. There was something almost rank in the sweet bursting out of the land. She thanked goodness that a daisy was a daisy still, modest and unmagnified. She was not used to hedges of fuchsia. Nature might have been a little more sparing of her myrtle too. Louie always dropped from her bicycle when, coming out of one of the canals of still and scented air, she saw, across a burnt heath-patch or a clump of hardy gorse, a glimpse of the sea. For the sake of a look at the sea she often walked up the hill behind Chesson's and sat on the stile she had crossed on the morning after her interview with Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.

Except by her example, however, she incited nobody else to break the Rules.

It was curious that she should know herself to be popular, and yet at the same time should also be secretly aware that she was a little out of things. All went well enough for the present, but only for the present. She knew quite well what would happen did she, a year or two hence, chance to meet any of her present fellow-pupils. She would not, then, be older than they in quite the same sense that she was now. They would meet; there would be eager recollections of the old days at Chesson's; oh, for that matter she could make it all up now!... "Come where we can have a really good talk! Where's Burnett Major now, and her sister? And have you heard from Elwell lately? And I wonder what's become of that red-haired girl--what was her name--Earle--yes, Earle? And of course you know Macfarlane's going to be married.... Now tell me all about what you're doing!"... Oh yes, Louie could make all this up--the bursts, the pauses, the dead stops, and then the falsely bright, perfunctory talk about Chesson's again. For she and her fellow-students would not be doing the same things. They would have taken recognised places, and Louie was not sure that she herself had a place to take. Her father and mother had seen to that. She remained a spectator. If she was liked now, it was not because she went one inch out of her way to be so. She was just as ready to go out of her way to be disliked if she must go out of it at all.

In the meantime, however, here she was at Chesson's, to all intents and purposes her own mistress, and made so much of that she had Mrs. Lovenant-Smith largely at her mercy--for, had she been requested to leave, the two Burnetts, Elwell and others would now have left with her. So, doing exactly as she liked, and adored on every hand, Louie even wondered sometimes whether she had not been wrong in supposing that restlessness and discontent were bred in the very bones of her.

She was at the very top of her popularity about the time Burnett Major gave the birthday "cocoa" in her cubicle. (That is to say, Burnett Major gave the nucleus of the "cocoa"; the rest of the party happened by a natural process of accretion.) This time the junketing was held by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's permission; it had been acceded readily. "Lovey's not such a bad old sort when you get used to her," B. Major said. It was in mid-May, on a hot evening, and, though Burnett's window was flung wide open, showing the dark yew outside, not a breath stirred, and the flames of the candles were four inches long in the air. Besides cocoa, Burnett had provided cake and biscuits and candied fruits and an enormous box of "assorted" chocolates; and Burnett's bed was like to break down with the weight of girls upon it.

Louie had had Burnett Major especially in her mind when she had painted her fancy picture of a possible meeting with her fellow-students a year or two hence. The two sisters were the daughters of a Gloucestershire M.F.H., and Louie could forgive B. Major for being a little dazzled by her approaching presentation. There was nothing unfamiliar to Louie, either, in the rest of the things she felt herself, at one and the same time, both "in at" and "out of," for probably Mewley Hall, the Burnetts' home, was not very different from Trant or Mallard Bois. But Burnett Major's position a few years hence was a forgone conclusion; she filled it already in anticipation; and the noisy talk that was in progress as Louie joined the party threw bright lights on it.

They were discussing the coming vacations. These were Chesson's yearly dread. They interrupted his supply of free labour, and there were always fewest girls when he most wanted them. As the vacation arrangements rested after all chiefly with the parents, he could do little except express his preference that as many of the girls as possible should take their holidays in the empty month of June, and his hope that those who did not do so would defer them until as late as they could. Otherwise he was, to that extent, no better off than his trade competitors.

"Here she comes," Burnett Minor was crying as Louie entered the crowded cubicle. "I want to be here when Causton is. It's all right for Major--oh, you needn't think we don't know, Major--if you aren't actually engaged he's always about the place when you're at home--and I'm going to stalk you both with a camera and then what-d'you-call-it--blackmail him----"

"Shut up, Minor, or I shall send you out," B. Major ordered.

"Then I shall tell everybody who he is and shout his name through the keyhole. It's----" She moved her lips, threatening to pronounce the name there and then.

"Sneak!" said her sister.

B. Minor bridled.

"I _will_ tell them if you call me that again! Causton, have you a young man? (That means, Avez-voo un jeune homme, Pig?)"

"Not for you to shout his name through keyholes," Louie replied, smiling.

"No, but do tell us--have you?"

"At my age?" said Louie mockingly, sitting down on the edge of the bed and reaching for candied fruits.

"Go on--you're trying to wriggle out of it--_have_ you?"

"Hush, little girl--open your mouth----" She popped a fruit into the mouth that itself resembled an untouched fruit.

Pigou, from the lower deck of the washstand, interposed loudly:

"Elle a vingt-quatr'ans--elle est perdue!"

"Uppé petite chose, avec voter Françay," commented Burnett Minor.

"Cau-ston coiffe déjà Sainte Catherine," said the ruthless Pigou: "à vingt-quatr'ans on est déjà--pff!"

"Non elle isn't pff--rude chose! But she'll tell me when we sleep out, because I'm going to have my mattress next to hers, sha'n't I, Causton?"

"Mais elle vient d'promettre----"

"--and we shall talk about all those things you always say 'Hush' when I come in--sha'n't we, Causton?"

"Prrridd-ee!" taunted the French child: and B. Major spoke.

"But I say, Causton, when do you take your vac.--June or September?"

"And where shall you go?" somebody else demanded.

"I'm going to Ireland--father's taken a house," cried a third.

"Nobody cares where you're going! Causton, will you come home with us?"

"No; come to Ireland with us!"

"Well, can I come home with you? I loved that man who brought you here!" (Burnett Minor was the young woman who had loved Chaff.)

"It wasn't Lord Moone, was it?" Macfarlane asked.

"Or was it your father?"

"Your cocoa, Causton," said B. Major.

Louie had never been so run after before. She curled up among the slippered feet at the foot of the bed (there were four girls stretched upon it), and alternately stroked the hair and tweaked the ears of Burnett Minor, who had defeated Pigou in the scramble to put her head into Louie's lap. "I _can_ have the pitch next to yours, can't I?" the child demanded, her eyes turned up and her face (to Louie) upside down. "There, you see, Pig, she says I can--so voo juste pouvez sechey-up, là."

This sleeping out was a summer custom at Chesson's. It began with the warm weather, sometimes in June, sometimes in July. On account of the morning and evening carrying of bedding and mattresses, the "pitches" nearest the house were deemed the most desirable, and weeks ahead there was bickering about the "bagging" of them. They bickered now, and then turned to the vacations again.

Louie listened, saying little. For her, vacations in this sense hardly existed. Vacations lose their value when you study as slackly as Louie