but she took no apparent notice.

"Is Cliffe-on-Sea your destination?" she asked presently.

"No; is it yours?" with a quick note of alarm in her voice. "Oh, I am so
sorry!" as Bessie nodded. "I hoped we should have travelled together to
London. I do dislike travelling alone, but my friend was too ill to
accompany me, and I did not want to stay at Islip another day; it was
such a stupid place, so dull; so I said I must come, and this is the
result."

"And you are going to London? Why, your journey is but just beginning.
Cliffe-on-Sea is where I live, and we cannot be more than two miles off.
Oh, what will you do if we are detained here for two or three hours?"

"I am sure I don't know," returned the other girl disconsolately, and
her eyes filled with tears again. "It is nearly five now, and it will
be too late to go on to London; but I dare not stay at a hotel by
myself. What will mamma say? She will be dreadfully vexed with me for
not waiting for Mrs. Moultrie--she never will let me travel alone, and
I have disobeyed her."

"That is a great pity," returned Bessie gravely; but politeness forbade
her to say more. She was old-fashioned enough to think that disobedience
to parents was a heinous offence. She did not understand the present
code, that allows young people to set up independent standards of duty.
To her the fifth commandment was a very real commandment, and just as
binding in the nineteenth century as when the young dwellers in tents
first listened to it under the shadow of the awful Mount.

Bessie's gravely disapproving look brought a mocking little smile to the
other girl's face; her quick comprehension evidently detected the
rebuke, but she only answered flippantly:

"Mamma is too much used to my disobedience to give it a thought; she
knows I will have my way in things, and she never minds; she is sensible
enough to know grown-up girls generally have wills of their own."

"I think I must have been brought up differently," returned Bessie
simply. "I recollect in our nursery days mother used to tell us that
little bodies ought not to have grown-up wills; and when we got older,
and wanted to get the reins in our own hands, as young people will, she
would say, 'Gently, gently, girls; you may be grown up, but you will
never be as old as your parents--'" But here Bessie stopped, on seeing
that her companion was struggling with suppressed merriment.

"It does sound so funny, don't you know! Oh, I don't me