She liked the friendly schoolfellows with their loud talk and boisterous manners, the girls who called her "Halliday," and who were always borrowing her reels of crochet-cotton and her pencils, her collars and pocket-handkerchiefs.

She liked the free-and-easy schoolgirl talk better than her mother's tame discourse; she preferred the homely litter of the spacious schoolroom to the prim splendours of Georgy's state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of colour.

She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the mysteries and complications of the Stock Exchange.
On this bright June afternoon other girls were chattering gaily about the fun of the breaking-up ball and the coming delights of the holidays, but Charlotte sighed when they reminded her that the end of her last half was close at hand.
She sat under a group of trees on the lawn, with a crochet antimacassar lying in her lap, and with her friend and favourite, Diana Paget, sitting by her side.
Hyde Lodge was that very establishment over which Priscilla Paget had reigned supreme for the last seventeen years of her life, and among all the pupils in a school of some forty or fifty girls, Diana was the one whom Charlotte Halliday had chosen for her dearest companion and confidante, clinging to her with a constancy not to be shaken by ill-fortune or absence.

The girl knew very well that Diana Paget was a poor relation and dependant; that her bills had never been paid; that all those incalculable and mysterious "extras," which are the martyrdom of parents and the delight of schoolmistresses, were a dead letter so far as Diana was concerned.

She knew that "poor Di" had been taken home suddenly one day, not in compliance with any behest of her father's, but for the simple reason that her kinswoman's patience had been worn out by the Captain's dishonesty.