"Well, now we've done all we can, and all I mean to do," said Alice Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue.

"Everything's perfectly comfortable, and if she doesn't like it, we can't help it.

I don't know why we make such a fuss." The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated basket-chair that offered itself.

It was a spring day, and the windows of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were open to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just coming into blossom.

Through their twinkling buds and interlacing branches could be seen grey college walls--part of the famous garden front of St.
Cyprian's College, Oxford.