most intense
relief. "I have had no one for the last fortnight and the place is
getting very untidy. You will pay the first pound in advance," she
added; "I hope you will bring it with you to-morrow."

She seemed painfully anxious for the money; if Joan had not been so
tired she might have thought the fact suspicious. As it was she went
back to Shamrock House with a lightened heart. It was not a very
attractive or promising post; if she were to judge by outside
appearances and by Miss Bacon's last remark her chief duties were to
include those of general cleaning up and dusting. But that would be all
in the day's work. Some little confidence and hope were beginning to
creep back into her heart. She had secured her first post; Miss Bacon
held out vague visions of the triumphs to which it might lead. Surely in
time she would get away from the nightmare of the last two months; in
time even Aunt Janet would forgive her, and meanwhile her foot was on
the lowest rung of the ladder; work should be her world in future. She
would work and fight and win. There was still, as Miss Abercrombie would
have said, a banner to be carried. She would carry it now to the end.

CHAPTER XII

"Our life is spent in little things,
In little cares our hearts are drowned;
We move with heavy laden wings
In the same narrow round."

For the first week in her new post Joan was kept very busy putting
things--as Miss Bacon described it--to rights. She had also, she
discovered, to run errands for Miss Bacon several times during the
course of a day; to buy paper for the typewriters, to fetch Miss
Bacon's lunch, on one occasion to buy some cooling lotion for Miss
Bacon's bruise. Of the other pupils she saw no sign, and even the girl
who had admitted her on the first night did not put in an appearance,
but this Miss Bacon explained by saying that Edith was delicate and
often forced to stay away through ill health.

Joan refrained from asking questions; she realized herself that she had
stumbled on to something that was nearly a tragedy. The hunted look in
Miss Bacon's face, the signs of poverty, the absolute lack of work told
their own tale. As a running business 2, Baker Street, was an evident
failure, but there was no reason why, with a little application, she
should not make it serve her purpose as a school. The lack of tuition
was its one great drawback; there seemed no signs whatsoever of the
promised shorthand less