Part 1
ELENA FRERE and her two younger brothers, Willie and Leigh, were on the whole very good children. They were obedient and affectionate and very truthful. Perhaps it was not very difficult for them to be good, for they had a happy home, wise and kind parents, and a quiet regular life. None of them had ever been at school, for Mrs. Frere liked home teaching best for girls, and the little boys were as yet too young for anything else. Willie was only seven and a half, and Leigh six. Helena was nearly ten.
They lived in the country—quite in the country, and a rather lonely part too. So they had almost no companions of their own age, and the few there were within reach they seldom saw. One family in the neighbourhood, where there were children, always spent seven months abroad; another home was saddened by the only son being a cripple and unable to walk or play; and the boys and girls of a third family were rather too old to be playfellows with our little people.
"It really seems," said Helena sometimes, "it really seems as if I was never to have a proper friend of my own. It's much worse for me than for Willie and Leigh, for they've got each other," which was certainly true.
Still, she was not at all an unhappy little girl, though she was very sorry for herself sometimes, and did not always quite agree with her Mother when she told her that it was better to have no companions than any whom she could not thoroughly like.