“I can’t learn in this way, Aunt Pike,” she pleaded earnestly; “I can’t get on a bit.  I dare say it is silly of me, but my own way doesn’t do any one any harm, and I can learn my lessons in half the time, and remember them better.”

“Katherine, do not argue with me, but do as I tell you.  It is the right way for a young lady to sit to her studies, and it will strengthen not only your back-bone, but your character as well.  You are sadly undisciplined.”

So Kitty, irritated, sore, and chafing, struggled on once more with her lessons.  But to get her work done she had, after all, to take her books to bed with her, and there, far into the night, and early in the morning, she struggled bravely not only to learn, but to learn how to learn, which is one of the greatest difficulties of all to those who have grown up drinking in their knowledge not according to school methods.

Nothing but her determination not to let Anna outstrip her could have made her persevere as she did at this time, and she got on well until Anna, whether consciously or unconsciously she alone knew, interfered to stop her.

“Mother! mother!” Anna in a straight, plain dressing-gown, her hair in two long plaits down her back, tapped softly in the dead of night at her mother’s door, and in a blood-curdling whisper called her name through the keyhole.

Mrs. Pike roused and alarmed, flew at once at her daughter’s summons.  “What is the matter?  Are you ill?  I thought you were drinking rather much lemonade.  Jump into my bed, and I will—­”

“No, it isn’t me, mother, I am all right; it’s—­it’s the girls.  I saw a light shining under their door, and I was so frightened.  Do you think it’s a fire?”

Considering the awfulness of that which she feared, Anna was curiously deliberate and calm.  It did not seem to have struck her that her wisest course would have been to have first rushed in and roused her cousins, and have given them at least a chance of escape from burning or suffocation.  Now, too, instead of running with her mother to their help, she crept into the bed and lay down, apparently overcome with terror, though with her ears very much on the alert for any sounds which might reach them.  Perhaps she shrank from the sight that might meet her eyes when the door was opened.

Mrs. Pike, far more agitated than her daughter, without waiting to hear any more, rushed along the corridor and up the stairs to the upper landing where all the children’s rooms were, and flinging herself on Kitty’s door, had burst it open before either Betty or Kitty could realize what was happening.  Betty, seriously frightened, sprang up in her bed with a shriek.  Kitty dropped her book hurriedly and sprang out on the floor.

“What is the matter?” she cried, filled with an awful fear.  “Who is ill?  Father?  Tony?” But at the violent change in her aunt’s expression from alarm to anger her words died on her lips.