I always expect to be in long before Cicely Harradine, the girl who shares the place with me. We first made friends in a ten-shillings-a-week bedroom at the Twentieth Century Club, when she was left much as I was, a waif without any friends that counted, and with just a tiny lump of capital. This she used up in paying her fees at the Slade School of Art, where she’d gone, in her innocence, with a view to taking up fashion-drawing. They all used to say at home that she’d “a gift” for sketching, and she’d heard—we’ve all heard!—that there are fortunes to be made out of fashion-plates. Only she hadn’t realized that for a girl of her sort, lovely and good-hearted and “gormless,” there’s only one way of getting a fortune; namely, by marrying it. And how can you marry, as she often says plaintively, if you never even see any “possible” men? All the people she seems to see nowadays—besides Slade students—are the gorgeous Jewesses who deal at the “studio” where Cicely’s one real “gift” (that of a tall, willowy figure) is now turned to advantage by showing off the evening-frocks and opera-wraps of Madame ChÉrisette, in Bond Street, in the show-rooms she can seldom leave until well after seven o’clock.

So to-day I was astonished to find the second-hand, cretonne-covered couch in our sitting-room already occupied by what looked like a bundle of rugs, dishevelled red curls, and arnica bandages, whence proceeded the sound of dismal sobs.

“Cicely!” I cried, alarmed. “You back already? Why, what’s happened?”

“Oh, my dear, such an awful catastrophe!” wailed the voice of Cicely, while the willowy figure twisted itself into sitting up against our cheap flock cushions. “What do you think? When I went out to lunch this morning I managed to slip on a bit of banana-skin that some perfect pig had flung down at the crossing—No, Tots! it wasn’t those shoes I will wear, so you needn’t say that!—and I twisted my ankle and cut my head on the kerb, and I had to be brought home in a taxi, and the doctor’s been, and he says I’m to keep my foot up for a fortnight, and what—what on earth’s to become of my job?” wept Cicely. “ChÉrisette won’t take me on again, for there’s a girl waiting now for my place! A niece of somebody’s! She’ll snap it up! And what am I to do? Hurp, hurp!”

She could only sob, and I could only stroke her pretty, incompetent fingers.

“There’ll be that doctor to pay! And it’ll be the rent again in three weeks’ time! It’s always being the rent, in this place, Tots! It never was at home. And I haven’t got any money saved now that I’ve bought that bicycle for Saturday afternoons. Isn’t it perfectly awful? Hurp, hurp! Oh, girls at home who get doctors and dentists and washing and everything f-found for them, hurp! are so fond of envying girls who earn their own livings because it’s so free and independent—how can they? They wouldn’t want to earn their horrible livings if they only knew how ghastly it was as soon as you got ill and hadn’t anything but a few shillings between you and goodness knows!”

“‘Earned increment is sweet, but that unearned is sweeter,’” I quoted bitterly.

“Oh, you laugh at everything, Tots! This is serious. S-s-s-seven-and-sixpence! That’s all I’ve got left in the whole wide world! And you’ve nothing but your twenty-five bob a week!”

(Yes! I thought; and even that modest salary will be lost to me to-morrow. For when I tell the Governor that I find I can’t accept his offer, he’s pretty certain to sack me. After his allusion to my “work,” after Mr. Dundonald’s “warrrnings,” what else need I expect? But this wasn’t the moment to tell my poor, distracted chum my own bit of bad luck. Even if we were both out of work and on those rocks together, it must, for the present at least, be kept from her.)

“Now look here, don’t you worry,” I said, more cheerfully than I felt. “You know you’re no end of a ‘find’ as a mannequin, because you’ve got the voice that goes with the figure. It must be rather a shock when Madame’s clients ask something that looks like a young duchess in a dream of a gown ‘What did you say the price was?’ and get told in the accents of Whitechapel ‘Twenty-ite paounds, Madam!’ That’s the pull you’ve got, so you know you’re sure of another good place as soon as your foot’s right. Until then I—I can manage perfectly well for the two of us. What about something to eat? Mrs. Skinner coming back to cook to-night?”—Mrs. Skinner is supposed to “do” for us. I often think that, in another sense, she will!

“No. She’s off for the whole day to go to a funeral. You said she might, this morning.”

“So I did. I thought it was a week ago—it feels like it. Well, I’ll get supper.”

As I passed into our little dark cubby-hole of a kitchen, I saw something that I’d overlooked before—a letter left lying on the mat, as it had dropped through the letter-box. I picked it up. It was addressed to me. And at the sight of the thin foreign envelope and the South African stamp my heart sank even lower. I had a presentiment that I hadn’t come to the worst yet.

It was a letter from my brother in Cape Town; poor old ne’er-do-weel Jack, who scarcely ever writes anything more than a picture postcard with a view of the Cape of Good Hope, or something of that kind, unless he’s in trouble and wants something.

With a sigh I took out the crackling, scrawled sheet; and my eyes fell on the last sentences first.

A hundred pounds? Mightn’t he just as well have said “a million”? What was all this about? I took the letter into my own little room and sat down on the camp-bed to read it through....

In five minutes I have grasped all that I can take in at present of the situation; an old one.

Jack is in trouble, worse trouble than ever before. Debts; an I O U that was to fall due in six weeks. Threatened exposure of—something that he doesn’t explain. “A business affair?”

Yes; Mr. Dundonald is quite right. I have “no head for business routine.” My head’s going round with the bewilderment of it. It can’t mean that Jack, my own brother, Father’s only son—one of the Trants—has been “not quite straight” with the accounts that are in his care? He must be mad! It must be the hot sun in that awful country. Not Jack——!

But to suggest that I should turn to Sydney Vandeleur for the money, even supposing that I knew where the Vandeleurs were to be found just now—oh! As if I wouldn’t rather die! Yet there’s nothing else that I can do——

Stop. There is one thing.

For, as if flashed in letters of fire over the dim purple sky over the London roofs outside my window, I seem to see the words—

And they mean, not only a solution of the difficulties of Miss Trant, typist, not only comforts and security for Cicely, the show-girl out of work, but the saving of our family name and honour from disgrace. Help instead of ruin for that poor dear weak-kneed broken reed of a brother of mine.

It’s Providence, that wildly eccentric scheme of the Governor’s. I don’t care what its object may be. I only know that now—now—I daren’t refuse to fall in with it. Never mind the details. The main fact is that I must have that hundred pounds, and this is the only way to it.

I’ve just taken supper into our sitting-room, and I’ve been able to smile quite recklessly down into the woe-begone, girlish face under the arnica bandages.

“Buck up, Cis, and eat some really good scrambled eggs with little bits of ham chopped up in them. And then there’s some glass loganberries, hot; and somebody’d been what Mrs. Skinner calls ‘pampering the milk,’ so I got a brown jar of cream for them. One comfort of living in a mÉnage without any men (a joke, so please laugh) is that we can eat what we like, instead of stodging horrible, gristly chops and steaks and potatoes every night of our lives. And I brought in some red ink—not Veuve Emu this time, but really decent Burgundy to cheer us up——”

“But, my dear—!” protested Cicely, with the scared glance of the business-girl who knows what it costs to eat and drink.

“It’s not extravagance. I can afford it.”

“You can’t! You can only just manage to scrape along for yourself—and you know your poor darling hat’s awful, and you told me you couldn’t get another—you haven’t managed to put by a penny for ‘extras’—you told me yesterday——”

“Ah, yesterday! But I shall have some more money—now.”

“What?—and you never told me when you came in? What, have Waters and Son actually given you a rise?”

“Supplementary duties,” I explained briefly, drawing a wooden chair up beside Cicely’s couch and laying a clean towel over it for a tablecloth before I set down the plate of ham-scramble. “Pretty well-paid, too. Yes. I got the job to-day. And,” I concluded with resolution, “I begin it to-morrow.”