ms, having primed her well beforehand, brought in the more important
girls to see her, and by dint of a cautious reserve she passed very well
with them, as with Miss Burt and Miss Walker. Tims seemed to feel much
more nervous than Milly herself did when she joined the other students
as usual.

There were moments when Tims gasped with the certainty that the
revelation of her friend's blank ignorance of the place and people was
about to be made. Then Mildred--for so, despising the soft diminutive,
she now desired to be called--by some extraordinary exertion of tact and
ingenuity, would evade the inevitable and appear on the other side of
it, a little elated, but otherwise serene. It was generally marked that
Miss Flaxman was a different creature since she had given up worrying
about her Schools, and that no one would have believed how much prettier
she could make herself by doing her hair a different way.

Miss Burt, however, was somewhat puzzled and uneasy. Although Milly was
looking unusually well, it was evident that all was not quite right with
her, for she complained of a failure of memory, a mental fatigue which
made it impossible for her to go to lectures, and she seemed to have
lost all interest in the Schools, which had so lately been for her the
"be-all" as well as the "end-all here." Miss Burt knew Milly's only near
relation in England, Lady Thomson, intimately; and for that reason
hesitated to write to her. She knew that Beatrice Thomson had no
patience with the talk--often silly enough--about girls overworking
their brains. She herself had never been laid up in her life, except
when her leg was broken, and her views on the subject of ill-health were
marked. She regarded the catching of scarlet-fever or influenza as an
act of cowardice, consumption or any organic disease as scarcely, if at
all, less disgraceful than drunkenness or fraud, while the countless
little ailments to which feminine flesh seems more particularly heir she
condemned as the most deplorable of female failings, except the love of
dress.

Eventually Miss Burt did write to Lady Thomson, cautiously. Lady Thomson
replied that she was coming up to town on Thursday, and could so arrange
her journey as to have an hour and a half in Oxford. She would be at
Ascham at three-thirty. Mildred rushed to Tims with the agitating news
and both were greatly upset by it. However, Aunt Beatrice had got to be
faced sometime or other and Mildred's spirit rose