"How did your grandfather come to allow you to travel alone?" she asked suddenly. "From what you have told me about him I should have thought it was the very last thing he should have allowed you to do."
"He was very reluctant to give me permission to travel without an escort," Margaret answered, "but he was unable to avoid doing so." And then she related how the housekeeper who was to have brought her had broken her leg, and how a sudden epidemic of scarlet fever in the village had made it advisable for her departure not to be delayed.
"Of course," she added, "my grandfather was not aware that I should miss the train and be obliged to wait here, or else I am quite sure he would not have allowed me to come by myself. But please, please do not let us talk about me any longer. I want to hear about you now and, except that your name is Eleanor Kathleen Carson, I do not know anything at all about you."
"There is not much to tell," returned Eleanor; "and what there is is not particularly interesting; but fair is fair, as the children say. Know, then, to begin with, that I have even fewer relations in the world than you, for I have none at all."
"None!" Margaret exclaimed incredulously. "Then with whom do you live? Where is your home?"
"I have no home. I have been earning my living for the last three years," Eleanor answered.
"Earning your own living. But are you not too young to do that? In what manner do you earn it?"
"As a governess. I have been an instructor of the young for the last four years," Eleanor said, laughing a little at the expression of boundless amazement which this statement brought to Margaret's face. Indeed, for a moment the latter suspected her new acquaintance of joking. She found it hard to believe that a girl of her own age should actually be a governess. She had thought that all governesses were of Miss Bidwell's age, and like her, too, in appearance.
"I wish you had been my governess, then," she said earnestly.
"It would have been rather a farce if I had been," Eleanor retorted, "for I have an idea that you know very much more than I do; not that that would be difficult, for I know nothing. Listen, now, and I will tell you all about myself. I am Irish. My father died when I was four, and two years later my mother married again."