Dr. Hooper laughed.

"You'll find her, I expect, a very independent young woman--"

But at that moment his daughter Nora, after a hurried and perfunctory
knock, opened the study door vehemently, and put in a flushed face.

"Father, I want to speak to you!"

"Come in, my dear child. But I can't spare more than five minutes."

And the Reader glanced despairingly at a clock, the hands of which were
pointing to half past ten a.m. How it was that, after an eight o'clock
breakfast, it always took so long for a man to settle himself to his
work he really could not explain. Not that his conscience did not
sometimes suggest the answer, pointing to a certain slackness and
softness in himself--the primal shrinking from work, the primal
instinct to sit and dream--that had every day to be met and conquered
afresh, before the student actually found himself in his chair, or
lecturing from his desk with all his brains alert. Anyway, the Reader,
when there was no college or university engagement to pin him down,
would stand often--"spilling the morning in recreation"; in other words,
gossiping with his wife and children, or loitering over the newspapers,
till the inner monitor turned upon him. Then he would work furiously for
hours; and the work when done was good. For there would be in it a kind
of passion, a warmth born of the very effort and friction of the will
which had been necessary to get it done at all.

Nora, however, had not come in to gossip. She was in a white heat.

"Father!--we ought not to let Connie furnish her own rooms!"

"But, my dear, who thinks of her doing any such thing? What do you
mean?" And Dr. Hooper took his pipe out of his mouth, and stood
protesting.

"She's gone out, she and Annette. They slipped out just now when mother
came in to you; and I'm certain they've gone to B's"--the excited girl
named a well-known Oxford furniture shop--"to buy all sorts of things."

"Well, after all, it's my house!" said the Reader, smiling. "Connie will
have to ask my leave first."

"Oh, she'll persuade you!" cried Nora, standing before her father with
her hands behind her. "She'll make us all do what she wants. She'll be
like a cuckoo in the nest. She'll be too strong for us."

Ewen Hooper put out a soothing hand, and patted his youngest daughter
on the shoulder.

"Wait a bit, my dear. And when Connie comes back just ask her to step in
here a moment. And now will you both please be gone--at once?--quick
once?