Alice read and reread the note. When she looked up from it, it was with a rather flustered face.
“Awfully good of you, Connie! May I show it—to Mr. Pryce?”
“Yes—but get it back. Tell him to write to Lord Glaramara to-morrow. Well, now then”—Connie discovered and lit a cigarette, the sight of which stirred in Alice a kind of fascinated disapproval,—“now then, tell me what’s the matter!—why Uncle Ewen looks as if he hadn’t had a day’s rest since last term, and Nora’s so glum—and why he and she go sitting up at night together when they ought to be in their beds?”
Connie’s little woman-of-the-world air—very evident in this speech—which had always provoked Alice in their earlier acquaintance, passed now unnoticed. Miss Hooper sat perplexed and hesitating, staring into the fire. But with that note in her pocket, Alice felt herself at once in a new and detached position towards her family.
“It’s money, of course,” she said at last, her white brow puckering. “It’s not only bills—they’re dreadfully worrying!—we seem never to get free from them, but it’s something else—something quite new—which has only happened, lately. There is an old loan from the bank that has been going on for years. Father had almost forgotten it, and now they’re pressing him. It’s dreadful. They know we’re so hard up.”
Connie in her turn looked perplexed. It was always difficult for her to realise financial trouble on a small scale. Ruin on the Falloden scale was intelligible to one who had heard much talk of the bankruptcies of some of the great Roman families. But the carking care that may come from lack of a few hundred pounds, this the Risboroughs’ daughter had to learn; and she put her mind to it eagerly.
She propped her small chin on her hands, while Alice told her tale. Apparently the improvement in the family finance, caused by Connie’s three hundred, had been the merest temporary thing. The Reader’s creditors had been held off for a few months; but the rain of tradesmen’s letters had been lately incessant. And the situation had been greatly worsened by a blow which had fallen just before the opening of term.
In a former crisis, five years before this date, a compassionate cousin, one of the few well-to-do relations that Mrs. Hooper possessed, had come to the rescue, and had given his name to the Hoopers’ bankers as guarantee for a loan of £500. The loan was to have been repaid by yearly instalments. But the instalments had not been paid, and the cousin had most unexpectedly died of apoplexy during September, after three days’ illness. His heir would have nothing to say to the guarantee, and the bank was pressing for repayment, in terms made all the harsher by the existence of an overdraft, which the local manager knew in his financial conscience ought not to have been allowed. His letters were now so many sword-thrusts; and post-time was a time of terror.
“Father doesn’t know what to do,” said Alice despondently. “He and Nora spend all their time trying to think of some way out. Father got his salary the other day, and never put it into the bank at all. We must have something to live on. None”—she hesitated—“none of the tradesmen will give us any credit.” She flushed deeply over the confession.
“Goodness!” said Connie, opening her eyes still wider.