Miss Foster really was a much-tried woman. Just as she had settled comfortably into her groove, just as she had got the domestic arrangements in B. House to run on oiled wheels exactly in the direction she desired, just as the whole household had learnt that her will was law and her methods the only possible methods, there came this girl--this most upsetting, disorganising, disturbing girl: a girl as impossible to ignore as to coerce; a girl whose all-pervading presence was made manifest in every corner of the house.

Miss Foster was above all things orderly. She made a fetish of tidiness, and her drawing-room was its temple. She had arranged it entirely to her own liking, and the furniture was as the fixed stars in the fabric of the firmament. It really pained and distressed her should a fidgeting guest move a chair ever so little out of its own proper orbit, and she quite longed for such an one to depart that she might promptly push the errant piece of furniture back into its original position. In her eyes the drawing-room was perfect, incapable of improvement, and any alteration therein must of necessity be for the worse.

Imagine her feelings then when she came back to find a grand piano and a harp added to its effects! Even this she might have borne had the harp remained quietly in some inconspicuous corner; but it proved a restless and ubiquitous instrument, and she never knew where she might find it next.

Lallie could not move it herself, and she would ring for one of the maids to help her; and once moved would leave it where it was, even though three chairs and a sofa had been displaced to make room for it. Before her arrival the drawing-room had never been used in the morning unless for the reception of some lunching parent. The fire had been lit at two precisely, and up to three o'clock Miss Foster rarely entered the room unless to arrange the two vases of flowers that always graced the mantelpiece. Miss Foster was of the opinion that there was something irregular, Bohemian, almost disreputable, in using a drawing-room for any other purpose than that of receiving friends; and it seemed to her to emphasise the unpleasant fact of Lallie's Irish origin, that now the girl invaded this sacred room directly after breakfast, and that the fire was lit before by Tony Bevan's orders.

Lallie practised there, sewed there, even cut things out there upon the gate table that hitherto had never been unfolded except for afternoon tea.

She would leave her green silk work-bag hanging on the backs of chairs or slung carelessly upon any excrescence that happened to be handy, such as the bell or the knob of a Chippendale tallboys. She left books about on unaccustomed tables, and had been known to fling the newspaper outspread and sprawling, loose and flagrant, upon the Chesterfield that stood in stately comfort at a convenient distance from the hearth.

Everywhere there were traces of Lallie. When she sewed, and she was always sewing if she wasn't knitting, she dropped bits of thread and snippets of material upon the carpet, sometimes even pins.

A large old-fashioned footstool was placed in the very centre of the hearthrug right against the tall brass fender. Miss Foster liked it there, and it had never been moved or even used except when some unusually bold boy would sit thereon and warm his back when he came to tea. Lallie was for ever moving that stool. Nearly all the chairs in the drawing-room were rather high, and she liked a footstool. It never occurred to her that the footstool was to be considered in any other light than as a footstool, and she dragged it about to whatsoever chair she wanted to sit in, sometimes curling up the edge of the hearthrug in her course.

    "A footstool by the hearth so prim,
    An oaken footstool was to him
    And it was nothing more"--

Only in this case the him was a her, which made such insensibility even more unpardonable in Miss Foster's eyes.

"Why do you always move the footstool, Miss Clonmell?" she asked one day.

"Because the chairs are so tall and my legs are so short," Lallie answered.

"The chairs are of the usual height. Chairs are not nowadays manufactured for pigmies," Miss Foster said severely.

"Did they use to be?" Lallie demanded with interest.

"No one has ever complained of the chairs in this house before," Miss Foster continued, ignoring Lallie's question.

"I never complained of them, Miss Foster. They're very nice chairs as chairs go: a bit straight and stiff, perhaps, but quite endurable if one has a footstool. Tony has comfortable chairs in his room. I wonder how men always manage to get such comfortable chairs? It's the same at home; Dad has always the best of the chairs in his den, though I must say we have a good many that are pretty decent."

"The hearth does look so naked without that stool," Miss Foster lamented.

"I'll try to remember to put it back when I've done with it," Lallie said, with undiminished sweetness; "but I'm not very good at putting things back."

"That I have already observed, Miss Clonmell, and it is a pity. No untidy person has ever achieved real greatness."

"Are you sure, Miss Foster? That's rather a sweeping assertion."

"I believe it to be a fact," Miss Foster replied coldly, "although it is quite possible you may be able to bring forward one or two examples to the contrary."

"I'm trying to think of all the lives of great men that ever I've read, and I can't remember if it said they were tidy or not. I've an idea some of them were not. Goldsmith now----"

"Goldsmith was Irish," Miss Foster interrupted.

"So was Wellington; so's Lord Roberts."

Miss Foster, without being at all sure of her facts, longed to point out that orderliness was a striking characteristic of both these heroes, but the fact of their nationality deterred her.

"I fear," Lallie went on, "that Shakespeare must have had a niggly sort of mind in some ways in spite of his genius, because he left his wife the second-best bed. If he'd been an ordinary, careless, good-natured kind of man he'd never have remembered to specify which bed. Perhaps, though"--and here Lallie spoke more cheerfully, as though she suddenly perceived a rift in this cloud resting upon Shakespeare's memory--"it was his wife who was so tiresome and finnicky, always pestering him about not using the best things, so he left her the second-best bed as a punishment."

Miss Foster made no reply, but opened the Spectator with a flourish and held it up in front of her as a screen.

"Don't you think that is possible, Miss Foster?" Lallie persisted.

"I must refuse to discuss any such absurd contingency. I have already told you that I believe disorderly personal habits to be incompatible with true greatness of character."

Lallie sighed deeply.

"It sounds like a police court case," she said sadly. "'Lallie Clonmell, having no visible means of subsistence, and giving no address, was yesterday arrested as being of "disorderly personal habits."' Well, Tony would come and bail me out if the worst came to the worst. And yet I'm considered very tidy and managing at home; quite a sort of Mrs. Shakespeare, in fact. Everything depends on environment."

M............