got to earn enough to buy my cottage, before I can have it."

Audrey groaned again. "Why, you will be ninety, and I shall be
eighty-nine--far too old to sit on a balcony--it will be too risky.
And if you are still energetic enough to bang your wash-bowl, I shall be
too deaf to hear it."

"Indeed, I shall not be ninety. I am going to try hard to be a lecturer,
and I shall get quite a lot of money, and grandfather says he will sell me
the cottage--he has got _the very one_ I want--for a hundred pounds, as
soon as I am twenty-one. Won't it be lovely, Audrey?"

"Lovely!" sighed Audrey. "Oh, Irene, how splendid to have something like
that to work for."

"It is. Why don't you do the same? It makes life seem so splendid, so
interesting and beautiful. You try it too, Audrey."

"Oh, but I couldn't," said Audrey, wistfully, "there is so much to do
here----"

"But at the end of the twelve months, when you go back to your
grandmother?"

"Granny would not hear of it. She can't bear the idea of girls--women--
working like that, lecturing, I mean. She doesn't mind their being
governesses, if they have to, but they must not be anything else."
Audrey paused for a moment. "I am not going back to granny, though," she
added softly.

"What?" Irene really gasped with astonishment. "I thought--oh, Audrey,
won't you be very unhappy? You loved it so. I thought you were counting
the days."

"So I was, but I am not now. I am going to stay here. Mother needs me
more--and there is so much to do. And I know it will be better for mother
not to have hard work to do, even when she is quite well again; and if
Faith and I take care of the house and the children, mother will be able
to go on with her writing. She loves it, and it is such a help."

Irene stood leaning against the kitchen table, gazing thoughtfully before
her. "I think it is fine of you, Audrey," she said earnestly. "You are
right; but it is fine of you."

Audrey coloured hotly with pleasure, but: "No it is not," was all she
said, "it is only what you would do."

"But I love the work, you don't. I do not want to do any other--you long
to, I know."

Audrey groaned. "Oh, Irene, I simply ache with longing to write.
I have stories and stories in my brain, and I feel sometimes as though my
head will burst if I don't write them down. I would sit up all night, or
get up very, very early in the morning to write them, but I am always so
sleepy, I can't keep my