Hammond-Smiths in No. 10," said Lettice. "If we might only make an
exchange, everybody would be satisfied."

Miss Maitland, however, had reasons for her arrangements, which she did
not care to explain. She knew far more of the inner life of the house
than the girls suspected, and hoped that by a judicious sandwiching of
different elements certain undesirable traits might be eliminated, and
the general tone raised. Though she was often aware of things that were
not entirely to her satisfaction, she was wise enough not to interfere
directly, but by careful tactics to allow the reformation to work from
within, experience having taught her that codes fixed by the girls
themselves were twice as binding as those enforced by the authorities.

The bedrooms at St. Chad's were on two floors, Nos. 9 to 16 being on
the upper story, and Nos. 1 to 7 on the lower. No. 8, occupied by Honor
and Janie, was the higher of two small rooms built over the porch, and
occupied a position midway between the two floors, being reached by a
short flight of steps from the landing below. In No. 4 slept Evelyn
Fletcher, the youngest girl in the house. She shared the room with an
elder sister and two cousins, all three members of the Sixth Form.
Though Evelyn was thirteen, she was very small and childish for her
age, and was treated rather as a pet by the Chaddites. She was a pretty
little thing, with appealing blue eyes, fluffy hair, and a helpless,
dependent manner. It was the great trial of her life that she was
obliged to go to bed more than an hour before the other occupants of
No. 4. She had a morbid horror of being alone in the dark--a horror
that, through a sensitive dread of being laughed at, she had so far
confessed to no one, but which, all the same, was very real and
overwhelming. Night after night she would lie with the curtain of her
cubicle half-drawn, and the door ajar so as to catch a gleam of light
from the landing, listening with every nerve on the alert for she knew
not what, and enduring agonies until the welcome moment when her sister
Meta came upstairs. It was, of course, very foolish, but her terror was
probably due to a dangerous illness from which she had suffered some
years before, and which had left a permanent delicacy.

One evening the younger girls had retired as usual, and everything was
very quiet in the upper stories. Evelyn lay wideawake, sometimes
straining her ears to catch a sound from the ground floor below, an