Over Miss Charlotte's bed Wythie had hung a fine photograph of St. Lucy, with her lamp and the palm of a martyr's victory. It was like Oswyth to remember the significance of St. Lucy's legend, her sacrifice of her beautiful eyes and her reward of others more beautiful than those which she had lost, and her name's meaning—light. To remember how peculiarly appropriate to blind Cousin Charlotte, whose inward vision revealed to her more than mere eyes could have shown, was the legend of Santa Lucia.
"It seems kind of quiet, like a place to be good in," said little Polly Flinders, surveying the result of the girls' work in the lean-to room with serious gaze, as she nursed Prue's old doll, Hortense.
It grew to be just that to all the Grey family. When annoyances came, when those days dawned which dawn for every one, in which nothing seems right and many things seem wrong; when nerves quivered and other people seemed suddenly aggressive and unkind, then Wythie, Rob, and Prue fell into the habit of creeping up to Cousin Peace's little lean-to room to be set straight.
"It is like having a domestic chapel," said Rob, who most of the three was subject to perturbed spirits and the variability, which, she said herself, was due to the reddish shade of her bright brown hair.
Little Polly Flinders loved dearly to crawl off into the corner, as far under the lean-to as the low rocking-chair, which had served all the Greys in turn, would go, and quietly to sit rocking Hortense, watching Miss Charlotte with awe-struck eyes that never got to the end of the charm and the lessons of that gentle face.
It became Polly's task to water the flowers in the boxes under the windows in the lowest dip of the lean-to, because she most easily of any of the inmates of the little grey house could crawl up to them as they thirstily awaited her. Perhaps it was because Polly was so faithful to them, perhaps because Charlotte Grey loved them so dearly, but for some reason the flowers in the lean-to room blossomed as no others in Fayre seemed to blossom, and filled the air with the sweetness of mignonette, heliotrope, and roses, brightening the quiet room with their glad colours.
Prue came home one afternoon with a face that would have betrayed her perturbed state of mind to her family had there been any one about to have seen it. But her mother had gone to Aunt Azraella's, Wythie and Rob were out, Lydia sat in the kitchen darning long black hose to a wailing accompaniment, and Kiku-san was too sleepy at that hour to be observant of Prue's expression.
But the instant she crossed the threshold of the lean-to room, Miss Charlotte dropped her knitting—as usual she was making soft wrappings for little babies—and said: "Why, Prudy, dear girl, what has happened?"
"No one ever sees things as quickly as you do, Cousin Peace!" exclaimed Prue, taking off her hat before the landscape mirror, and lightly "fluffing" her golden hair before she took the low stool opposite Cousin Peace. "There hasn't anything really happened, Cousin Charlotte, but there is a chance for something to happen."