Mr. Wycherly's Wards - L. Allen Harker

MR. WYCHERLY'S WARDS

L. ALLEN HARKER

AUTHOR OF "MISS ESPERANCE AND MR. WYCHERLY,"
"MASTER AND MAID," "A ROMANCE OF THE NURSERY,"
"CONCERNING PAUL AND FIAMETTA," ETC.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1912

Published January, 1912

BOOKS BY L. ALLEN HARKER

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Miss Esperance and Mr. Wycherly
Mr. Wycherly's Wards
Master and Maid
Concerning Paul and Fiammetta
A Romance of the Nursery

To
MY DEAR FRIEND
JEAN MARGARET CARNEGIE BROWN

Emerson says, "To have a friend you must be a friend."
That, dear, is why you have so many.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

["The Flittin'"]
[The House Opposite]
[The Princess]
[The Beggar Maid]
[Their Meeting]
[Mr. Wycherly Adds to His Responsibilities]
[Jane-Anne Swears Fealty]
[Jane-Anne Assists Providence]
[The Quest]
[Fortune's Wheel]
[The Cult of Bruey]
[Found!]
[A Far Cry]
[An Experiment]
[The Philosophy of Beauty]
[The Pursuit Continued]
[The Philosophy of Effort]
[Gantry Bill]
[The Starling Flies Away]

MR. WYCHERLY'S WARDS

CHAPTER I

"THE FLITTIN'"

"When lo there came a rumour,

A whispering to me

Of the grey town, the fey town,

The town where I would be."

FRANCIS BRETT BRETT-SMITH.

The village was thunderstruck. Nay, more; the village was disapproving, almost scandalised.

It was astounded to the verge of incredulity when it heard that a man who had lived in its midst quietly and peaceably for five-and-twenty years was suddenly, and without any due warning whatsoever, going to remove to the south of England not only himself, but the entire household effects of a dwelling that had never belonged to him.

It is true that the minister pointed out to certain of these adverse critics that by her will Miss Esperance had left both house and furniture to Mr. Wycherly in trust for her great-nephews; but people shook their heads: "Once the bit things were awa' to Oxford wha' kenned what he'd dae wi' them?"

Such conscientious objectors mistrusted Oxford, and they deeply distrusted the motives that led Mr. Wycherly to go there in little more than a month after the death of his true and tried old friend.

That it was a return only made matters worse, and the postman, who was also one of the church elders, summed up the feelings of the community in the ominous words: "He has gone back to the husks."

Even Lady Alicia, who liked and trusted Mr. Wycherly, thought it was odd of him to depart so soon, and that it would have been better to have the boys up to Scotland for their Easter holidays.

What nobody realised was that poor Mr. Wycherly felt his loss so poignantly, missed the familiar, beneficent presence so cruelly, that he dreaded a like experience for the boys he loved. The "wee hoose" in the time of its mistress had always been an abode of ordered cheerfulness, and Mr. Wycherly wanted that memory and no other to abide in the minds of the two boys.

It was all very well to point out to remonstrating neighbours that March and not May is "the term" in England; that he was not moving till April, and that the time would just coincide with their holidays and thus save Edmund and Montagu the very long journey to Burnhead. Neither of these were the real reasons.

The "wee hoose" had become intolerable to him. Hour by hour he found himself waiting, ever listening intently for the light, loved footstep; for the faint rustle that accompanies gracious, gentle movements; for the sound of a kind and welcoming old voice. And there came no comfort to Mr. Wycherly, till one day in a letter from Montagu at Winchester he found these words: "I suppose now you will go back to Oxford. Mr. Holt thinks you ought, and I'm sure Aunt Esperance would like it. She always said she hoped you would go back when she wasn't there any more. It must be dreadfully lonely now at Remote, and it would be easier for us in the holidays."

"I suppose now you will go back to Oxford." All that day the sentence rang in Mr. Wycherly's head. That night for the first time since her death he slept well. He dreamed that he walked with Miss Esperance in the garden of New College beside the ancient city wall, and that she looked up at him, smiling, and said, "It is indeed good to be here."

Next day, as Robina, the servant, put it, "he took the train," and four days later returned to announce that he had rented a house in Oxford and was going there almost at once.

* * * * *

If Mr. Wycherly's sudden move was made chiefly with the hope of sparing the boys sadness and sense of bereavement in this, their first holidays without their aunt, that hope was abundantly fulfilled.

It was a most delightful house: an old, old house in Holywell with three gables resting on an oaken beam which, in its turn, was supported by oak corbels in the form of dragons and a rotund, festive-looking demon who nevertheless clasped his hands over "the place where the doll's wax ends" as though he had a pain.

Two of the gables possessed large latticed windows, but the third was blank, having, however, a tiny window at the side which looked down the street towards New College.

At the back was a long crooked garden that widened out like a tennis racquet at the far end.

It was all very delightful and exciting while the furniture was going in and the three stayed at the King's Arms at the corner.

Edmund and Montagu between them took it upon themselves to settle the whereabouts of the furniture and drove the removal men nearly distracted by suggesting at least six positions for each thing as it was carried in. But finally Mr. Wycherly was bound to confess that there was a certain method in their apparent madness. For as the rooms in Holywell filled up, he found that, allowing for difference in their dimensions and, above all, their irregularity of shape, every big piece of furniture was placed in relation to the rest exactly as it had been in the small, square rooms at Remote.

Boys are very conservative, and in nothing more so than in their attachment to the familiar. They pestered and worried that most patient foreman till each room contained exactly the same furniture, no more and no less, that had, as Edmund put it, "lived together" in their aunt's house.

Then appeared a cloud on the horizon. Lady Alicia, who loved arranging things for people, had very kindly written to a friend of her own at Abingdon, and through her had engaged "a thoroughly capable woman" to "do for" Mr. Wycherly in Oxford.

"She can get a young girl to help her if she finds it too much after you're settled, but you ought to try and do with one at first; for a move, and such a move—why couldn't you go into Edinburgh if you want society?—will about ruin you. And, remember, no English servant washes."

"Oh, Lady Alicia, I'm sure you are mistaken there," Mr. Wycherly exclaimed, indignant at this supposed slur on his country-women. "I'm sure they look even cleaner and neater than the Scotch."

"Bless the man! I'm not talking of themselves—I mean they won't do the washing, the clothes and sheets and things; you'll have to put it out or have someone in to do it. Is there a green?"

"There is a lawn," Mr. Wycherly said, dubiously—"it's rather a pleasant garden."

"Is there a copper?"

"I beg your pardon?" replied the bewildered Mr. Wycherly, thinking this must be some "appurtenance" to a garden of which he was ignorant.

"There, you see, there are probably hundreds of things missing in that house that ought to be in it. You'd better put out the washing."

Mr. Wycherly felt and looked distinctly relieved. The smell of wet soapsuds that had always pervaded Remote on Monday mornings did not appeal to him.

And now, when all the furniture was in its place and the carpets laid; when the china and pots and pans had been unpacked by the removal men and laid upon shelves; when the beds had been set up and only awaited their customary coverings; on the very day that the "thoroughly capable woman" was to come and take possession of it all, there came a letter from her instead to the effect that "her mother was took bad suddint," and she couldn't leave home. Nor did she suggest any date in the near future when she would be at liberty to come. Moreover, she concluded this desolating intelligence with the remark, "after having thinking it over I should prefer to go where there's a missus, so I hopes you'll arrange according."

Here was a knock-down blow!

They found the letter in the box at the new house when they rushed there directly after breakfast to gloat over their possessions.

The wooden shutters were shut in the two downstairs sitting-rooms; three people formed a congested crowd in the tiny shallow entrance, even when one of the three was but ten years old. So they went through the parlour and climbed a steep and winding staircase to one of the two large front bedrooms. There, in the bright sunlight of an April morning, Mr. Wycherly read aloud this perturbing missive.

"Bother the woman's mother," cried Edmund who was not of a sympathetic disposition. "Let's do without one altogether, Guardie. We could pretend we're the Swiss Family Robinson and have awful fun."

"I fear," said Mr. Wycherly sadly, "that I, personally, do not possess the ingenuity of the excellent father of that most resourceful family."

"Shall I telegraph to Lady Alicia?" asked Montagu, who had lately discovered the joys of the telegraph office. "She could poke up that friend of hers in Abingdon to find us an orphan."

"No!" replied Mr. Wycherly with decision. "We won't do that. We must manage our own affairs as best we can and not pester our friends with our misfortunes."

"How does one get servants?" asked Montagu.

Nobody answered. Even Edmund for once was at a loss. None of the three had ever heard the servant question discussed. Old Elsa had lived with Miss Esperance from girlhood; dying as she had lived in the service of her beloved mistress. Robina had come when the little boys were added to the household and remained till Mr. Wycherly left for Oxford, when she at last consented to marry "Sandie the Flesher," who had courted her for nine long years.

Mr. Wycherly sat down on a chair beside his bed immersed in thought. Montagu perched on the rail at the end of the bed and surveyed the street from this eminence. As there were neither curtains nor blinds in the window his view was unimpeded. Edmund walked about the room on his hands till he encountered a tin-tack that the men had left, then he sat on the floor noisily sucking the wounded member.

It seemed that his gymnastic exercises had been mentally stimulating, for he took his hand out of his mouth to remark:

"What's 'A High-class Registry Office for servants'?"

Mr. Wycherly turned to him in some excitement.

"I suppose a place where they keep the names of the disengaged upon their books to meet the needs of those who seek servants. Why? Have you seen one?"

Edmund nodded. "Yesterday, in yon street where you went to the bookseller. It was about three doors up, a dingy window with a wire blind and lots of wee cards with 'respectable' coming over and over again. They were all 'respectable' whether they were ten pounds or twenty-four. I read them while I was waiting for you."

"Dear me, Edmund," exclaimed Mr. Wycherly admiringly, "what an observant boy you are. I'll go there at once and make inquiries. In the meantime I daresay we could get a charwoman to come in and make up the beds for us, and so move in to-morrow as arranged. They can't all be very busy yet as the men have not come up."

"But there's only three beds," Edmund objected; "she can't make them all day."

"She can do other things, doubtless," said Mr. Wycherly optimistically; "she'll need to cook for us and," with a wave of the hand, "dust, you know, and perhaps assist us to unpack some of those cases that are as yet untouched. There are many ways in which she could be most useful."

"I'd rather have Swissed it," Edmund murmured sorrowfully.

"Shall we come with you?" asked Montagu, who had an undefined feeling that his guardian ought not to be left to do things alone.

"No," said Mr. Wycherly, rising hastily. "You might, if you would be so good, find the boxes that contain blankets and sheets and begin unpacking them. I'll go to that office at once."

He hurried away, walking fast through the sunny streets, so strange and yet so familiar, till he came to the window with the wire blind that Edmund had indicated. Here he paused, fixed his eyeglasses firmly on his nose and read the cards exhibited. Alas! they nearly all referred to the needs of the servantless, and only two emanated from handmaidens desirous of obtaining situations. Of these, one was a nursemaid, and the other "as tweeny," a species unknown to Mr. Wycherly, and as her age was only fourteen he did not allow his mind to dwell upon her possibilities.

He opened the door and an automatic bell rang loudly. He shut the door, when it rang again, greatly to his distress. He seemed to be making so much noise.

The apartment was sparsely furnished with a largish table covered with rather tired-looking ledgers; two cane chairs stood in front of the table, while behind it was a larger leather-covered chair on which was seated a stout, formidable woman, who glared rather than looked at Mr. Wycherly as he approached.

She really was of great bulk, with several chins and what dressmakers would call "a fine bust." Her garments were apparently extremely tight, for her every movement was attended by an ominous creaking. Her hair was frizzed in front right down to her light eyebrows; at the back it was braided in tight plaits. She regarded Mr. Wycherly with small, hostile eyes.

He had removed his hat on entrance, and stood before her with dignified white head bowed in deference towards her, courteously murmuring, "Good morning."

As she did not make any response, he continued, "I am in need of a competent cook-housekeeper, and thought perhaps——"

"How many servants kep'?" she demanded with a fire and suddenness that startled Mr. Wycherly.

"I had thought of trying to do with one."

"'Ow many in fambly?" and this alarming woman opened one of the books in front of her and seized a pen. There was in her tone such a dreadful suggestion of, "Anything you may say will be used against you," that when she dipped her pen into the ink Mr. Wycherly positively trembled; and grasped the back of one of the cane chairs as a support.

"For the larger portion of the year I shall be alone," he said rather sadly, "but during the holidays my two wards——"

"Male or female?"

"Really," Mr. Wycherly remonstrated, "what has that got to do with it? As a matter of fact my wards are boys."

All this time she had been making entries in the ledger; now she looked up to fire off, abruptly as before:

"The booking fee is one-and-six."

Mr. Wycherly took a handful of silver out of his pocket and abstracted this sum and laid it upon the desk. She of the ledger ignored the offering and continued her cross-examination:

"What wages?"

Mr. Wycherly mentally invoked a blessing upon Lady Alicia's practical head as he replied quite glibly, "From twenty to twenty-five pounds, but she must be trustworthy and capable."

"What outings?"

Here was a poser! But the fighting spirit had been roused in Mr. Wycherly. He would not be browbeaten by this stout, ungracious person who took his eighteenpence, and so far had done nothing but ask questions, affording him no information whatsoever.

"That," he retorted with dignity, "can be arranged later on."

"Your name and address?" was the next query, and when he furnished this information, carefully spelling his name, it pained him inexpressibly to note that she wrote it down as "Witcherby," at the same time remarking in a rumbling tone indicative of displeasure, "Very old 'ouses, most inconvenient, most trying stairs.... 'Ow soon do you want a general?"

"A what?" asked Mr. Wycherly, this time thoroughly mystified.

"A general, that's what she is if there's no more kep'. You won't get no cook-'ousekeeper unless she's to 'ave 'er meals along with you, and a little girl to do the rough work."

"She can't possibly have her meals with me," cried Mr. Wycherly, crimson at the very thought. "It would be most unpleasant—for both of us."

"Then as I said it's a general you wants."

"And have you upon your books any staid and respectable young woman—preferably an orphan—" Mr. Wycherly interpolated, remembering Montagu's suggestion, "who could come to us at once?"

"Not, so to speak, to-day, I 'aven't; but they often comes in of a Monday, and I'll let you know. I could send 'er along; it isn't far."

The ledger was shut with a bang as an intimation that the interview was at an end, and Mr. Wycherly fared forth into the street with heated brow and a sense that, in spite of his heroism in braving so dreadful a person, he was not much further on his quest. "Monday, she said," he kept repeating to himself, "and to-day is only Thursday."

When he got back to Holywell, the boys were standing at the front door on the lookout for him. They rushed towards him exclaiming in delighted chorus: "We've got a woman. We thought we'd ask at the King's Arms, and they told us of one."

"What? A servant?" asked Mr. Wycherly with incredulous joy.

"No, no, a day-body. The boots knew about her; she lives down Hell Lane, just about opposite."

"Edmund!" Mr. Wycherly remonstrated. "However did you get hold of that name?"

"Hoots!" replied Edmund. "Everyone calls it that. Her name is Griffin, and she's coming at once. Have you got one?"

"No," said Mr. Wycherly, "not yet. Boys, it's a most bewildering search. Can either of you tell me since when maid-servants have taken to call themselves after officers in the army? The rather alarming person in charge of that office informs me that what we require is a 'general.' Do you suppose that if we should need a younger maid to help her we must ask for a 'sub-lieutenant'?"

"Perhaps they are called generals when they're old," said Montagu thoughtfully; "at that rate we ought to call Mrs. Griffin a field-marshal. She's pretty old, I can tell you, but she's most agreeable."

"Probably," said Mr. Wycherly, "in time to come they will get tired of the army and take to the nomenclature of the Universities. Then we shall have provosts and deans and wardens. But I'm glad that you have been more successful than I have. I've no doubt we can manage with Mrs. Griffin until we get a maid of our own."

"I think it was mean of that body with the mother," said Edmund; "she didn't even say she'd come as soon as she could. But I think the Griffin will be fun, and if she can't do it all we'll get the Mock-Turtle to help her."

"Was it very high-class, that registry?" he continued; "it didn't look at all grand outside."

"I cannot judge of its class, I have never been to such a place before and I earnestly hope I may never be called upon to go there again, for it is a species of inquisition, and they write your answers down in a book. A horrid experience." And Mr. Wycherly shuddered.

By this time they had reached the house and he was sitting, exhausted, in his arm-chair in his own dining-room. The boys had opened the shutters and casement, and in spite of a thick coating of dust everywhere it looked home-like and comfortable.

"Richly built, never pinchingly" is as true of ancient Oxford houses as of her colleges. There seemed some mysterious affinity between the queer old furniture from Remote and that infinitely older room. The horse-hair sofa with the bandy legs and slippery seat that stood athwart the fireless hearth was in no way discordant with the beautiful stone fireplace and shallow mantelshelf.

Mr. Wycherly surveyed the scene with kind, pleased eyes; nor did he realise then that what made it all seem so endearing and familiar was the fact that on the horse-hair sofa there sprawled—"sat" is far too decorous a word—a lively boy of ten, with rumpled, curly, yellow hair and a rosy handsome face from which frank blue eyes looked forth upon a world that, so far, contained little that he did not consider in the light of an adventure.

While balanced on the edge of the table—again "sat" is quite undescriptive—another boy swung his long legs while his hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets. A tall, thin boy this, with grave dark eyes, long-lashed and gentle, and a scholar's forehead.

Montagu, nearly fourteen, had just reached the age when clothes seem always rather small, sleeves short, likewise trousers: when wrists are red and obtrusive and hair at the crown of the head stands straight on end.

Neither of the boys ever sat still except when reading. Then Montagu, at all events, was lost to the world. They frequently talked loudly and at the same time, and were noisy, gay and restless as is the usual habit of their healthy kind.

Strange companions truly for a scholarly recluse! Yet the boys were absolutely at ease with and fearless of their guardian.

With him they were even more artlessly natural than with schoolfellows of their own age. Their affection for him was literally a part of their characters, and, in Montagu's case, passionately protective. The elder boy had already realised how singularly unfitted Mr. Wycherly was, both by temperament and habit, to grapple with practical difficulties.

"Ah'm awfu' hungry," said Edmund presently, in broadest Doric.

"Edmund," remarked his guardian, "I have noticed on several occasions since you returned from school that you persist in talking exactly like the peasantry at Burnhead. Why?"

"Well, you see, Guardie, for one thing I'm afraid of forgetting it. And then, you know, it amuses the chaps. They admire it very much."

"But you never did it in Scotland," Mr. Wycherly expostulated.

"Oh, didn't I. Not to you and Aunt Esperance, perhaps, but you should have heard me when I got outside——

"I don't like it, Edmund, and I wonder your masters have not found fault with you."

"They think I can't help it, and it makes them laugh—you should hear me say my collect exactly like Sandie Croall——"

"Indeed I wish to hear nothing of the kind," said Mr. Wycherly in dignified reproof. "I can't think why you should copy the lower classes in your mode of speech."

"I'm a Bethune," Edmund replied in an offended voice. "I want people to know I'm a Scot."

"Your name is quite enough to make them sure of that," Mr. Wycherly argued, "and you may take it from me that Scottish gentlemen don't talk in the least like Sandie Croall."

At that particular moment Edmund was busily engaged in doing a handspring on the end of the sofa, so he forebore to reply. The fact was, that like the immortal "Christina McNab" Edmund had, early in his career at school, decided that to be merely "Scotch" was ordinary and uninteresting, but to be "d—d Scotch" was both distinguished and amusing, and he speedily attained to popularity and even a certain eminence among his schoolfellows when he persisted in answering every question with a broadness of vowel and welter of "r's" characteristic of those whom Mr. Wycherly called "the peasantry of Burnhead." Moreover, he used many homely and expressive adjectives that were seized upon by his companions as a new and sonorous form of slang. Altogether Edmund was a social success in the school world. His report was not quite equally enthusiastic, but, as he philosophically remarked to Montagu, "It would be monotonous for Guardie if we both had good reports, and your's makes you out to be a fearful smug."

Whereupon Montagu suitably chastised his younger brother with a slipper, and the subject was held over to the next debate.

Presently there came a meek little tinkle from the side-door bell.

"That'll be the Griffin," cried Edmund joyfully; "I'll open to her."

It was the Griffin, and their troubles began in earnest.

CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE OPPOSITE

"Still on the spire the pigeons flutter;

Still by the gateway flits the gown;

Still on the street, from corbel and gutter,

Faces of stone look down.

Faces of stone, and other faces...."

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH.

Mrs. Griffin was not in the least like her name. She was a sidling, snuffling, apologetic little woman, who, whenever a suggestion was made, always acquiesced with breathless enthusiasm, gasping: "Yessir; suttingly sir; anythink you please sir."

That night they dined at the comfortable King's Arms for the last time and moved in after breakfast on the morrow. Mrs. Griffin did not shine as a cook. Their first meal consisted of burnt chops, black outside and of an angry purple within, watery potatoes and a stony cauliflower. This was followed by a substantial apple dumpling whose paste strongly resembled caramels in its consistency, while the apples within were quite hard. Even the lumpy white sauce that tasted chiefly of raw flour, hardly made this an appetising dish.

She had, it is true, by Mr. Wycherly's order, lit fires in all four front rooms. The bedrooms were over the two living-rooms, and, like them, were wainscotted, irregular in shape, and fairly large, light and well-proportioned, each with wide casement window. Except the study, every room in the house had at least two doors, and between the two front bedrooms there was yet another, in a delightful, passage-like recess. In Mr. Wycherly's study, which was on the first floor at the back—with a high oriel window that looked forth on the garden—no fire had been put as yet, for his books were not unpacked but stood in great wooden cases, stacked against the wall, one on the top of the other, three deep. Wisps of straw and pieces of paper still lay about; and where his books were concerned Mr. Wycherly was quite practical.

During the day Mrs. Griffin, as she put it, "swep' up the bits" in the other rooms (Mr. Wycherly locked the study and carried the key), and volunteered to go out and "get in some stores" for the morrow. This offer he gratefully accepted, entrusting her with a couple of sovereigns to that end. It took her the whole afternoon, and she seemed to have patronised a variety of shops, for Mr. Wycherly, who remained in the house to look after it, was kept busy answering the side door and receiving parcels.

He had sent the boys to explore Oxford. They found the river and didn't get back till tea-time, a meal where the chief characteristics consisted of black and bitter tea and curiously bad butter.

They supped on tinned tongue and dry bread, and even the boys were glad to go to bed early in their grand new room.

The night before Mr. Wycherly left for England the minister came to see him. At first they talked of the move; of Oxford; of the great change it would make in the lives of the three most concerned. Then it was borne in upon Mr. Wycherly that Mr. Gloag was there for some special purpose and found it difficult to come to the point.

At last he did so; cleared his throat, looked hard at his host, and then said gravely: "I hope you fully realise, that in undertaking the sole guardianship of those two boys you must carry on the excellent religious training given them by Miss Esperance. There must be no break, no spiritual backwardness...."

"I assure you," Mr. Wycherly interposed, "that there is no lack of religious training in our English schools; it forms a large part...."

"That's as it may be," the minister interrupted. "It's the home religious training to which I referred, and it is that counts most in after life. For instance, now, did not Miss Esperance daily read the Bible with those boys when they were with her?"

"I believe she did," Mr. Wycherly replied meekly.

"Well, then, what is to prevent you from doing the same and so carrying on her work?"

"I will do my best."

"Remember," said the minister, "we are bidden to search the scriptures, and the young are not, as a rule, much given to doing it of their own accord."

"That is true," Mr. Wycherly agreed, wishing from his heart that they were, for then he would not be required to interfere.

"Then I may depend upon you?" asked the minister.

"As I said before, I will do my best," said Mr. Wycherly, but he gave no promise.

And now as he sat in his dusty dining-room—Mrs. Griffin's ministrations were confined to "the bits" and did not extend to the furniture—on this, the first evening in their new home, he heard the scampering feet over his head as the boys got ready for bed, and the minister's words came back to him. "He's right," he thought to himself, "it's what she would have wished," and spent as he was he went upstairs.

Their room was in terrible confusion, for both had begun to unpack, and got tired of it. Thus, garments were scattered on every chair and most of the floor. There were plenty of places to put things; all the deep old "presses" and wardrobes had come from Remote, and the house abounded in splendid cupboards; but so far nobody ever put anything away, and Mr. Wycherly wondered painfully how it was that Remote had always been such an orderly house.

He sat down on Edmund's bed. "Boys," he said, "you used always to read with Miss Esperance, didn't you?"

"Yes, Guardie," Montagu answered; then, instantly understanding, he added gently: "Would you like us to do it with you?"

"I should," said Mr. Wycherly gratefully; "we'll each read part of the Bible every day, and I'd like to begin now. Can you find your Bibles?"

This entailed much searching and more strewing of garments, but finally the school Bibles were unearthed.

"Let's begin at the very beginning," Edmund suggested, "then it'll take us years and years only doing it in the holidays."

"Oh, but we'll read a good bit at a time," said Montagu, who disliked niggardly methods where books were concerned. "It won't take so long really."

"Well, anyway, Guardie, we can miss the 'begats,' can't we? and the 'did evils in the sight,'" Edmund said beseechingly.

"We'll see when we come to them," Mr. Wycherly answered. "Who will begin?"

Edmund elected to begin, and read Chapter I. of Genesis.

Montagu read Chapter II. and Mr. Wycherly Chapter III.; but he got interested and went on to Chapter IV. He had just reached the verse, "And Cain talked with Abel, his brother: and it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him," when the book was pulled down gently by a small and grubby hand, "Thank you, Guardie, dear," Edmund said sweetly, "I don't want to tire you, and you know we never did more than one chapter with Aunt Esperance. One between the three of us!"

"I always sympathise with Cain," Montagu remarked thoughtfully. "I'm perfectly certain Abel was an instructive fellow, always telling him if he'd only do things some other way how much better it would be. Younger brothers are like that," he added pointedly, looking at Edmund.

"That view of the case never struck me," said Mr. Wycherly.

"It always strikes me every time I hear it," Montagu said bitterly. "It's just what Edmund does. He makes me feel awfully Cainish sometimes, I can tell you; always telling me I ought to hold a bat this way, or I'd jump further if I took off that way, or something."

"Well, you're such an old foozle," cried Edmund with perfect good nature. "So slow."

"I do things differently from you, but I do most of 'em every bit as well."

"So you ought, you're so much older."

"All the more reason for you to shut up."

The conversation threatened to become acrimonious, so Mr. Wycherly intervened by asking mildly: "Is there anything either of you would like me to explain?"

"Oh, dear, no," Edmund exclaimed heartily. "Not till we come to Revelations. Then it's all explanation. It takes Mr. Gloag an hour to explain one wee verse, so I fear we'll only be able to do about a word at a time."

"But you must not expect me," Mr. Wycherly cried in dismay, "to be able to explain things as fully as Mr. Gloag, who is a trained theologian."

"We shouldn't like you to be as long as Mr. Gloag, Guardie dear; we shouldn't like it at all," Montagu answered reassuringly.

Whereupon, much relieved, Mr. Wycherly bade his wards good-night, and departed downstairs again where he sat for some considerable time pondering Montagu's view of the first fratricide. "It seems to me," he said to himself, "that it is I who will be the one to receive enlightenment."

It was three days since they had, as Mr. Wycherly put it, "come into residence," and during that time Mrs. Griffin's cooking had not improved. Neither had the house become less dusty or more tidy. The time was afternoon, about five o'clock, and they sat at tea; a singularly unappetising tea.

Smeary silver, cups and plates all bearing the impress of Mrs. Griffin's thumb, two plates of thick bread-and-butter and a tin of bloater-paste were placed upon a dirty tablecloth. Neither Mr. Wycherly nor the boys liked bloater-paste, but Mrs. Griffin did. Hence it graced the feast.

Edmund was tired of bad meals. The novelty, what he at first called the "Swissishness," was wearing off, and as he took his place at table that afternoon there flashed into his mind a vivid picture of the tea-table at Remote. Aunt Esperance sitting kind and smiling behind the brilliant silver teapot that reflected such funny-looking little boys; the white, white napery—Aunt Esperance was so particular about tablecloths—laden with scones, such good scones, both plain and currant! Shortbread in a silver cake-basket; and jam, crystal dishes full of jam, two kinds, topaz-coloured and ruby.

Somehow the sight of that horrid tin of bloater-paste evoked a poignantly beatific vision of the jam. It was the jam broke Edmund down.

He gave a dry sob, laid his arms on the table and his head on his arms, wailing: "Oh, dear! oh, dear! I wish Aunt Esperance hadn't gone and died."

Mr. Wycherly started up, looking painfully distressed. Montagu ran round to his little brother and put his arm round his shoulder—at the same time he murmured to his guardian: "It's the butter, it really is very bad."

"It's all bad," lamented Edmund; "we shall starve, all of us, if it goes on. One morning that bed-making body will come in and she'll find three skeletons. I know she will."

Mr. Wycherly sat down again. "Edmund, my dear little boy," he said brokenly, "I am so sorry, I ought not to have brought you here yet...."

"Look, look at poor Guardie," whispered Montagu.

Edmund raised his head.

"Would you like me to telegraph to Lady Alicia and ask her to have you for the rest of the holidays? I know she would, and by-and-bye, surely, by-and-bye we shall find some one less incompetent than that—than Mrs. Griffin."

Edmund shook himself free of his brother's arm and literally flung himself upon his guardian, exclaiming vehemently: "No, no, I want to stay with you. It's just as bad for you."

It was worse, for Mr. Wycherly could not restore exhausted nature with liberal supplies of Banbury cakes and buns. For the last three days he had eaten hardly anything and was, moreover, seriously concerned that the boys were assuredly not getting proper food. He would have gone back with them to the King's Arms immediately he discovered how extremely limited were Mrs. Griffin's powers had it not been that just then he received the furniture removers' bill, and, as Lady Alicia had warned him, it was very heavy.

He had come in to tea with a sore heart that afternoon, for Mrs. Griffin had half an hour before informed him that she could not come on the morrow; so that now even her poor help would be lost to them. She was going, she said, to her "sister-in-law" at Abingdon for Sunday, as she needed a rest.

"So much cookin' and cleanin' is what I ain't used to; no, not if it was ever so; and I can't keep on with it for long at a stretch. I'll come on Monday just to oblige you if so be as I'm up to it."

"I wish you had told me this sooner," Mr. Wycherly remonstrated, "then perhaps I might have been able to obtain help for to-morrow elsewhere."

But what they were to do on the morrow was no concern of Mrs. Griffin's. It was an easy and lucrative place and she wanted no interlopers. But she also wanted her outing to Abingdon, and she was going.

Mr. Wycherly poured out the black tea and Edmund attacked a piece of bread-and-butter.

The red rep curtains from the dining-room at Remote were hung in the dining-room at Oxford, but they in no way shrouded its inmates from the public gaze except when they were drawn at night. The house stood right on the pavement; even a small child could see in, and a good many availed themselves of the privilege.

Over this room was the boys' bedroom. Here there were no "fixtures" on which to suspend curtains, nor did it strike either of the three most concerned that blinds or curtains were an immediate necessity. They had all lived in a house that stood so far from other houses (as its name signified) that such a contingency as prying neighbours never occurred to them and it never entered their heads to concern themselves with those on the other side of the road.

Presently Mrs. Griffin brought in a note held gingerly between her finger and thumb, remarking that it was from the "lady as lives hopposite."

Mr. Wycherly opened it hastily, found he had mislaid his glasses, and handed it to Montagu to read.

Edmund immediately rushed round to assist Montagu, thinking it was probably an invitation, and Edmund liked invitations.

Montagu read it slowly and impressively as follows:—

"DEAR SIR,

"I think it only right to inform you that I can see the young gentlemen performing their ablutions and dressing and undressing both when the light is on and in the morning. Such publicity is most distressing, and I venture to suggest that blinds or curtains should be affixed in their room without delay.

"Yours faithfully,

"SELINA BROOKS."

Mr. Wycherly sank back in his chair with a groan. "I quite forgot curtains and blinds," he exclaimed in bitter self-reproach. "There are none in my room either; do you suppose the people in the next house can see me?"

"Sure to!" cried Edmund gleefully; "they'll be writing next that they can see an old gentleman 'paforming his ablutions'; but I can't see how they do for we all wash in the bath-room, and that's at the back. I suppose they see us washing our teeth and you shaving. I wonder if that's more depressing or they don't mind so much?"

"But what can we do?" Mr. Wycherly exclaimed despairingly. "It is already Saturday evening and we ought to have blinds or something now, to-night. How do they fix blinds, by the way?"

Montagu went and stood at the window and gloomily surveyed the houses opposite.

"You can't see a thing in her house," he said sadly. "There's white curtains with frills downstairs and a straight thing right across the windows upstairs, and a looking-glass in one window shows just above the straight thing. You've got that, you know, for shaving; we might put ours there too; it would fill up a bit. It's against the wall just now because we liked to see out."

"Oh! they'd just peek round it," said Edmund. "We'd best nail a sheet across for to-night."

"But won't that look funny from outside?" Montagu objected.

"Not half so funny as us skipping about with nothing on," Edmund retorted.

Mr. Wycherly sat, his elbows on the table, his head in his hands: "Boys, boys, it is appalling that at the very outset we should have scandalised a neighbour and made ourselves a nuisance."

"Not a nuisance, Guardie," Edmund remonstrated; "she must have liked to watch us or she wouldn't have done it. If Mrs. Thingummy had kept behind her own curtains she couldn't have seen us so plain."

Here Mrs. Griffin tapped at the door again, opened it about three inches, and called through: "A lady to see you, sir."

"That'll be your one come to complain," Edmund whispered to his distracted guardian.

"Am I interrupting you? May I come in?" asked an exceedingly pleasant voice which was followed by a kind-looking, pretty young lady, who was rather surprised at her reception.

What she saw was a handsome, white-haired old gentleman seated at a table with his back to the light. Ranged on either side of him were two boys who regarded her with looks of dark suspicion, and on the faces of all three dismay and consternation were writ large, while Edmund's face was both tear-stained and exceedingly dirty.

Mr. Wycherly rose hastily as she came in.

Pretty Mrs. Methuen, wife of one of the youngest dons in Oxford, was quite unused to manifestations other than those of pleasure at her approach, and she stopped abruptly just inside the door to remark rather incoherently:

"Perhaps it is too soon; it may be inconvenient, but my husband asked me to call directly you arrived to see if I could be of any use.... He is still fishing in Hampshire, and as I passed I saw that you were here."

Mr. Wycherly let go of the table, which he had seized nervously, and advanced to shake her outstretched hand. Montagu pulled out a chair for her.

"Pray be seated," said Mr. Wycherly. "It is most kind of you to call.... These are my wards."

The lady took the proffered chair and shook hands with the boys, who still looked dubious, although Edmund was distinctly attracted.

On Mr. Wycherly's gentle, scholarly face bewilderment struggled to break through the mask of polite interest through which he regarded his visitor.

"You've only just come, haven't you?" she asked.

"We've been living in the house for three days, but we are far from being properly established; our servant has not arrived yet...."

"And we keep on finding out things we haven't got," Edmund interpolated.

"We hope to be a little more settled before term begins," Mr. Wycherly continued, ignoring Edmund.

"Have you been able to get everything you want?" asked the lady. "Should you need any information about the best shops ... or the people who do things ..."

"Ask about blinds!" whispered the irrepressible Edmund.

"You are most kind," Mr. Wycherly began, again ignoring his younger ward, "but..."

"Mr. Wycherly," the lady said suddenly, "I don't believe you have a ghost of an idea who I am. Did the woman not announce me? My husband is Westall Methuen, son of your old friend, and my father-in-law wrote saying that I was to be sure and call directly you arrived in case I could be of any use."

"I am ashamed to say," replied Mr. Wycherly, in tones full of courteous apology, "that if Mrs. Griffin did announce your name I did not catch it. I assure you..."

"She never said any name, just 'a lady,'" Edmund again interrupted, "and we thought you must be her."

"Were you expecting somebody dreadful that you all looked so horrified when I walked in?" asked Mrs. Methuen with laughter in her eyes as she turned to Edmund as being plainly the most communicative of the party.

"Well, we thought it very likely you had come to complain," Edmund continued, "and that is always rather beastly."

Mrs. Methuen did not possess six brothers without a familiarity with such possibilities. She did not press for an explanation, but tactfully changed the subject. Nor had she been in the room five minutes before she discovered that man and boys were all equally incapable of starting to housekeep, and that everything was in a desperately uncomfortable state. She herself had been at a "Hall." She knew Mrs. Griffin's type, and the very tea-table told its own dismal tale. She was young, kind-hearted, and energetic; nor had she been in Oxford long enough to achieve the indifference to the affairs of outsiders that is said to characterise the inhabitants of that city. So she promptly asked them all three to lunch on the morrow, nor would she take any denial; and she further suggested that the boys should walk back with her there and then so that they would know where to come.

The boys were charmed, and the three set off down the street, while Mr. Wycherly watched them from the front door till they turned the corner into Mansfield Road. He went up to his study unaccountably cheered and comforted.

"After all," he reflected, "I might ask that most charming young lady for advice if we fall into any serious dilemma. She looks so extremely alert and capable. Nevertheless, we must try to manage our own affairs without plaguing kind friends to assist us."

He forgot all about the curtainless windows, and set himself to unpack the large case marked "Earlier Latin Authors" that stood by itself nearest the door.

Mrs. Methuen took Edmund by the arm, asking confidentially: "Now what mischief had you been up to when I came in? What did you expect the people to complain about? Don't tell me if you'd rather not, but I know a good deal about boys, and I might be able to help."

"It wasn't us," Edmund answered quite seriously. "It was Guardie. He was afraid of them grumbling. Our one had complained already."

"Mr. Wycherly!" Mrs. Methuen repeated in astonishment. "Oh, nonsense! I'm perfectly sure he would never do anything anyone could complain of."

"Not willingly," said Montagu, who began to think it was time he took a small part in the conversation, "but, you see, people in this town seem rather huffy about curtains and blinds and things, and we've always lived in the country, where no one could see in, so we never thought of it. We were so proud of having the electric light too, but now it seems we'd have been better with just candles, for then, perhaps, Miss Selina Brooks wouldn't have written to complain. We'd best go to bed in the dark to-night."

"But do you mean to tell me someone wrote to complain that they could see you?"

"Yes, she did," cried Edmund. "'Paforming our ablutions' and 'it was very depressing,' and Guardie thinks the lady in the house opposite him will be writing next—you see, there's two houses opposite us; we're kind of between them, and one can see right into our room and the other right into his; but his bed's in a deep recess, so perhaps he wasn't quite so depressing."

Mrs. Methuen stood still in the middle of the road, seemingly not quite sure whether to laugh or to cry. Finally she laughed, but her voice was not very steady as she said: "Oh, poor dear Mr. Wycherly; how dreadful!"

"Oh, do you think," cried Montagu, "that you could tell us where we could buy blinds or something now, to-night? Such things do worry him so, and then he blames himself and remembers Aunt Esperance is away, and it feels so sad somehow. You see she always did everything like that."

"But that's the very sort of thing I can help in," cried this kind and understanding young lady, and this time she took Montagu's arm, so that they all three were linked confidingly together. "Did you bring no curtains from Scotland?"

"I don't know what we brought. There's boxes and boxes not unpacked yet. Perhaps it will be better when the servant comes, but you never saw such a muddle as there is just now," groaned Montagu.

"But why isn't your servant there to help you? It seems to me that just now is the time when she could be of the very greatest use."

"She was coming," Edmund said gloomily, "but her miserable mother went and got ill, and now she won't come at all, and there's only Mrs. Griffin. Do you know Mrs. Griffin?"

"I do not," Mrs. Methuen replied decidedly, "and from what I saw of her when she let me in, I don't desire her further acquaintance. How did you get her?"

"It was the man in the blue cotton jacket; we asked him, and he gave us a lot of names, but we chose Mrs. Griffin 'cause she lived so near and we liked her name. We got her, not Guardie."

"That, I should think, is a comforting reflection for Mr. Wycherly," Mrs. Methuen murmured; "but here we are. Now I'll take you in to see my baby and meanwhile I'll find some curtains and come back with you, and we'll put them up with tapes; that'll do anyway until Monday. You'll be well shrouded from the public gaze and can depress nobody—what a curious way to put it though."

"It was 'distressing,' not 'depressing,'" Montagu explained.

"Well, she depressed Guardie anyhow. I'll go into the attic when I get home, and if I can see the least little bit of her doing anything I'll write and complain."

"You won't be able to see," Montagu said sadly; "she sleeps at the top, and her house is higher than ours—I saw her open her window yesterday while I was in bed."

"You wait," said Edmund, wagging his curly head. "I bet you I'll see something somehow—and then I'll punish her for vexing Guardie."

"I expect she only meant to be kind," Mrs. Methuen suggested. "She probably realised that you, none of you, had thought of anyone seeing in."

"She might have waited a wee while," said Edmund, not at all disposed to take a charitable view of Miss Selina Brooks; "one can't have everything straight in a new house all in a minute. Why is your house like a church outside?"

Mrs. Methuen laughed. "It isn't in the least like a church inside. Come and see!" and as she opened the front door the boys followed her into a square hall furnished like a room. It was a big house, and extremely comfortable, with wide staircase and easy steps not half so steep as those in Holywell.

Mrs. Methuen ran up very fast, the boys after her.

She took them into a room where a plump, pink baby, about eighteen months old, had just been bathed and was sitting smiling and majestic on the nurse's knee. His clothing, it was a boy baby, as yet consisted of a flannel band; while a dab of violet powder on one cheek gave him a rakish air.

"My precious," said Mrs. Methuen, kissing the scantily attired one; "you must look after these gentlemen for me for a few minutes;" and she forthwith vanished from the room.

The nurse smiled and nodded to them. The baby remarked, "Mamma!" to no one in particular, and looked puzzled and hurt that she could tear herself away so soon. He wasn't used to it.

Edmund and Montagu advanced shyly towards their youthful host.

"Say how d'you do to the nice young gentlemen, like a good baby," said the nurse in tones that subtly combined command and supplication.

"Do," said the baby obediently.

"Will I turn for him?" asked Edmund, who had an idea that infants must always be amused or else they cried. Without waiting for an affirmative he flung himself over on his hands and turned Catherine wheels right round the room. Edmund was light and active and an adept in the art. The baby was charmed. His fat sides shook with delighted laughter, and he shouted gleefully, "Adain!"

Nurse deftly slipped a little shirt over his head and a flannel nightgown over that, and behold! he sat clothed and joyous on her knee before Edmund had finished his second acrobatic feat.

Edmund walked on his hands. He did handsprings. He turned somersaults, and finally played leap-frog with Montagu, but whatever he did that insatiable baby shouted, "Adain," bouncing up and down on his nurse's knee in enthusiastic appreciation of the entertainment.

Meanwhile Mrs. Methuen had found and packed up two pairs of thick cream-coloured casement curtains. She ran tapes in them ready to put up, for she was convinced there would be no rods; she also packed a hammer and nails, but she never knew what it was caused her to slip her travelling flask of brandy into the pocket of her coat.

She fetched the boys, and her small son roared in indignation at their departure, which upset her extremely.

However, it was getting late and the windows in Holywell were bare.

Meanwhile Mr. Wycherly had been working very hard: stooping and lifting, carrying and stretching, to arrange the Earlier Latin Authors in the top shelf of an empty bookcase. Some of the authors were heavy and calf-bound and Mr. Wycherly, who had eaten hardly anything at all that day, began to feel very tired. He was quite unused to violent exercise of any kind, and presently he became conscious of a most unpleasant pain in his left side. "A stitch, I suppose," he said to himself and went on stooping and lifting, for he had come to the last layer of books and wanted to feel that one case at any rate was unpacked.

The boys and Mrs. Methuen returned, but he didn't hear them.

"I'll go upstairs and begin at once," said Mrs. Methuen, "and you needn't tell Mr. Wycherly anything about it till I've gone."

She and Edmund went up into Mr. Wycherly's bedroom while Montagu tried to find his guardian. He was not in either of the sitting-rooms. That they had seen from the windows before they came in. Nor was he in the kitchen or the garden. At last Montagu bethought him of the hitherto unused study, climbed the steep, crooked staircase, and went down the sloping passage to look.

Mrs. Methuen was standing on a chair at one side of the window fastening the tape of a curtain round a nail she had just knocked in, while Edmund stood on another chair at the other side, holding the rest of the curtain that its fairness might not be sullied by contact with the extremely dusty floor, when Montagu burst into the room looking very frightened.

"D'you think you could come?" he asked breathlessly. "I'm afraid Guardie's ill or something, he's so white and he doesn't seem able to speak for gasping."

Down went the nice curtains in an untidy heap on the dressing-table as Mrs. Methuen leapt off the chair, seized something from her coat which was lying on the bed, and followed Montagu. Edmund had already gone.

Mr. Wycherly was sitting huddled up in his chair. His face looked wan and drawn in the fading light; he certainly was breathing heavily and with great difficulty. But when he saw Mrs. Methuen he made an ineffectual attempt to rise. She tore the silver cup from the bottom of the flask and tumbled the contents hastily into it.

"Don't try to get up," she said as she knelt down beside him; "you're a little faint; drink this, please, at once."

She literally poured the brandy down Mr. Wycherly's throat. "Clear those books off the sofa, boys," she commanded; "carefully now! Ah, that's better. Now you must lie down for a few minutes; it's bad to sit forward like that."

Somehow in three minutes this energetic young lady had taken entire command of the situation. Mr. Wycherly was helped on to the sofa, Edmund had fetched a rug to cover him, and she and Montagu were wrestling with the huge gothic window, which should have opened like a door in the centre and was, apparently, hermetically sealed. At last it yielded to their combined efforts, and the sweet, fresh evening air rushed into the room.

"Please finish the brandy," said Mrs. Methuen in precisely the same voice in which she would have adjured her baby not to leave any milk in his bottle. "You're completely done up; no proper food, no fresh air. I never felt anything like the atmosphere of this room; and then stooping and lifting heavy books on the top of all the rest. No wonder your heart gave out. I can't think why they make the cups of flasks such an awkward shape."

Mr. Wycherly meekly took the cup from her hand and drained it. Already his face looked less ashy and he could speak.

"I cannot tell you," he began——

"Don't try to tell us anything yet; for five minutes you are to stay perfectly quiet. I'll leave Montagu in charge, and he is not to allow you to stir till I come back. Come, Edmund."

Edmund's round face was very serious as he followed Mrs. Methuen back to the bedroom. Aunt Esperance, as he always put it, "was away." Aunt Esperance, who had seemed a necessary part of life—beneficent, immutable, inevitable. Yet she had gone, and her place knew her no more. Might not a like thing happen to Mr. Wycherly? And, if so, what was to become of him and Montagu?

Edmund was not imaginative. He lived his jolly life wholly without thought of the morrow. But at that moment he was startled into a realisation of how much he loved his guardian.

As once more he and Mrs. Methuen mounted their two chairs and started to put up the curtains again he looked across at her and noted with a sudden painful contraction of the heart that her face was very grave.

"You don't think, do you," he asked in a low voice, "that Guardie is going to die?"

Mrs. Methuen started and nearly dropped the curtain. "Oh, dear, no," she exclaimed hastily; "but you must take more care of him and not let him lift books or anything of that sort. When people are not very young they have to take things easily. You and Montagu must unpack the books and he can arrange them, but you must not let him stoop over the cases. Do you understand? He mustn't do it."

They finished the curtains in no time, and when Mrs. Methuen went back to the study Mr. Wycherly hastily arose from the sofa, where he had lain obediently ever since she put him there.

"I don't know how to thank you," he began——

"Please don't try," Mrs. Methuen said briskly. "The boys and I are having such fun, but I'm sorry to say that I must—I simply must—give you a little lecture. Boys! someone is knocking at the front door; go down and see who it is while I scold Mr. Wycherly."

Mrs. Methuen's own kitchen-maid, accompanied by a stout, fresh-coloured woman, carrying a large brown-paper parcel, were at the door, and Mrs. Methuen herself came down in a minute or two, when she explained that the rosy woman was one Mrs. Dew, that she had come "to look after them," and would stay with them till they got a proper servant. Moreover, the kitchen-maid carried a large basket of provisions. The fires had gone out in both kitchen and dining-room, and the evening was growing chill. That kitchen-maid lit both in no time. Mr. Wycherly was brought downstairs and installed in his big chair by the dining-room fire, and Mrs. Methuen went home. Yet once more she came back that night, and she swept the two boys up to their room and insisted on their putting all their clothes in drawers and cupboards under her supervision, and she and Mrs. Dew did the same by Mr. Wycherly without informing him of the fact.

Nothing could less have resembled the methods of Mrs. Griffin than those of Mrs. Dew. With her advent everything was changed at the house in Holywell. Order was evolved out of chaos, dust disappeared as if by magic, boxes were unpacked and removed empty to the attic, while, most important of all, meals were punctual and appetising.

Mrs. Dew had the extremely deferent manner of the well-trained servant who has "lived in good families." To Mr. Wycherly this manner was immensely soothing, coming as it did after his long experience of the dictatorial and somewhat familiar bearing of the Scottish servants at Remote. Mrs. Dew "knew her place" and kept to it rigidly, and Edmund found her rather unapproachable. Anything like reserve in his intercourse with his fellow-creatures was abhorrent to Edmund, and he pursued Mrs. Dew with questions as to her past, her present, and her future, getting, however, but small satisfaction for his pains.

"Have you any children, Mrs. Dew?" he demanded one day, when he had sought her in the kitchen for social purposes.

"No, sir, not of my own."

"Any grandchildren?"

"Certainly not, sir."

"No one belonging to you at all?"

"Of course, sir, I 'ave my relations, same as other folks."

"What sort of relations?"

"Well, for one, sir, I have a niece."

"Big or little?"

"About your own size, sir, though, I daresay, she's a bit older."

"Where does she live?"

"With me, sir, when she isn't at school. She's an orphan."

"Oh, like us. Where is she now?"

"Here, in Oxford."

"What's her name?"

"Jane-Anne, sir; but if I may say so, I don't think the kitchen's the proper place for a young gentleman like you."

"When shall I see Jane-Anne?"

"I don't suppose as you'll see her at all, sir, your paths in life being, so to speak, different."

Edmund sighed. "I wish you were a more telling sort of person, Mrs. Dew," he said sadly. "If you like to ask me any questions, you'll soon see what a lot I'd tell you."

"I hope I know my place better, sir!" Mrs. Dew remarked primly.

That afternoon he gave it up as a bad job.

Edmund did not forget his grudge against Miss Selina Brooks. By some curious mental process of unreasoning he traced Mr. Wycherly's sudden faintness, that had frightened them so much, to that good lady's letter about the curtainless windows. She had worried his Guardie, and therefore she was his enemy.

It did not in the least affect Edmund's opinion of her that Mr. Wycherly wrote a most courteous note thanking her for hers.

Edmund intended to be even with Miss Selina Brooks, but he bided his time.

The attics in Holywell were particularly large and splendid. There were only two, and they occupied the whole of the top floor, while each was reached by a separate staircase, and had no communication with the other. In all, there were five different sets of stairs in that old house. One attic was dedicated to the reception of empty boxes; but the other—which possessed a heavenly little crooked room opening out of it, in that third gable which boasted the small square window looking sideways down the street—Mr. Wycherly had given to the boys for their very own play-room.

At present there was nothing in it save two or three derelict chairs and a four-post bed with canopy and voluminous white dimity curtains. For some reason best known to herself, Mrs. Griffin had put up the curtains belonging to this bed which nobody wanted.

Just outside one of the doors on that landing was a curious little cupboard with strong oak doors, not more than three feet high. This cupboard was very dark, apparently very deep, and quite devoid of shelves or pegs.

During their first uncomfortable days the boys had not felt particularly interested in cupboards; but as things grew more peaceful and accustomed Edmund of the inquiring mind discovered this particular cubby-house. Montagu was not with him at the time, as now that they were settled, he did Greek for an hour every morning with Mr. Wycherly just before luncheon.

Edmund thrust his arm in as far as it would go, but couldn't reach the back, though the floor seemed to slope upwards. Carefully propping the door open with a chair, he crawled in on hands and knees. Once in, he found that floor and roof sloped steeply upwards and the roof was just over his head, he couldn't even kneel. He crawled further in, quite a long way, and the tunnel turned sharply to the right. He could no longer see the glimmer of light from the landing, but he had reached the end of the tunnel. At the same moment his head struck something that stuck out, and when he put up his hand he felt that it was a key by its shape. This was most exciting and must be investigated at once. There was no room to turn, so Edmund half crawled, half slid backwards out of the sloping tunnel, and flew downstairs to get some matches. To his joy he met nobody, which was as well, for he was covered with dust and cobwebs from head to foot. He rushed upstairs again feeling very adventurous and important, and once more crawled into the cupboard to the very end of the tunnel. He struck a match and found that he was up against another door, in the roof this time and precisely like the first one in every respect except that it had a large, heavy lock at one side, and in the lock was the rusty key that had hit him on the head. By no endeavour could Edmund get that key to turn. He lit match after match, throwing them carelessly on the old oak floor in a fashion that would have made Mr. Wycherly's hair stand on end had he seen it, and finally decided that alone he could not manage that door, and that Montagu must be taken into the secret.

Montagu was still closeted with Mr. Wycherly, so Edmund wandered into the kitchen, where Mrs. Dew, exclaiming at his appearance, promptly dusted, brushed, and washed him, much to his annoyance. However, he bore it with as good grace as possible, and then with disarming meekness asked: "What do you do, Mrs. Dew, when a key won't turn; an old sort of key in an iron lock?"

"Have you been down in the cellar, Master Edmund?" Mrs. Dew asked suspiciously. "Is that where you got all that dust and cobwebs? You've no business there, you know, meddlin' with locks."

"I haven't been near the cellar," Edmund answered indignantly; "dust and cobwebs seem just to come and sit on me wherever I go; I can't help it. But what do you do to a box, now, that won't open?" he added diplomatically, "when the key sticks and won't turn?"

"You wait till afternoon, sir, and I'll help you to open any box you want opened. But you might go and oil the lock if you like, then it can soak in till I come."

Edmund joyfully accepted the little bottle of oil and the feather that Mrs. Dew offered him, and flew upstairs again. This time he borrowed the candle from beside Mr. Wycherly's bed, lighted it, and took it with him.

Into his cupboard he went. He oiled and oiled: himself, the lock, the door, and the floor. He tried the key with one hand, he tried it with two. He got fearfully hot and exceedingly cross, and still that key refused to turn. Finally, in a rage, he put his shoulders under the door and heaved with all his might. The door in the roof seemed to yield a little, and this inspired Edmund to further efforts. He shoved and shoved, and pushed and pushed, till at last, quite suddenly, the whole thing gave, opening upwards and outwards. Edmund's head emerged into the light of day, and with rapture he discovered that he had only to step out on to the flat roof of a portion of the next house, which was considerably higher than Mr. Wycherly's.

His mysterious door was a skylight that had been boarded in. Why that curious tunnel was cut off from the rest of the house they never knew, but the little square of leads was a source of infinite joy to Edmund and Montagu till they grew too wide to wiggle through the passage. Nor did Edmund, with the curious reticence of children, inform either Mr. Wycherly or Mrs. Dew of his find.

A low parapet faced the street, and sloping slate roofs formed the two other sides of this delightful square. Edmund advanced to the edge of the parapet. He found that he looked straight across the road into a top bedroom of the house opposite. A bedroom so high that it had only curtains, ordinary dark curtains, not drawn at all; no short blind, and only a low dressing-table and small looking-glass to fill up the window. Edmund sat down hastily lest he should be seen, for there was somebody in the room opposite. Somebody with bare arms who was doing her hair.

Cautiously Edmund's head appeared above the parapet, and a look of vindictive glee overspread his hot and dirty face.

It was Miss Selina Brooks herself, and fate had delivered her into his hands.

The hair of Miss Selina Brooks was not abundant, and she added to it sundry tresses such as are described by fashion-papers as "graceful adjuncts." Edmund waited till the adjuncts were all in their proper place. Then he descended into his passage, shut the oak skylight, shut also the little gothic door leading to this undreamt-of paradise, retired to the bath-room to wash, lest Mrs. Dew should catch him again; and then, very quietly, went downstairs to the parlour, where, in the words of the French exercise, he sought "pens, ink and paper."

Edmund did not possess the pen of a ready writer; it was some time before he drafted a letter to his liking, but in its final form the missive ran thus:—

"DEAR MADDUM,

"I think it only right to inform you that I can see you doing your hair, both what is on and what is off, and I find it very depressing. I therefore venture to suggest that a blind should be affixed without delay. It's worse than ablushuns.

"Yours truly,

"EDMUND BETHUNE ESQRE."

This Edmund folded and placed in an envelope, which he sealed with his great-grandfather's seal. He then trotted across the road and dropped it into Miss Selina Brooks' letter-box.

Unlike Mr. Wycherly, Miss Brooks did not write to thank Edmund Bethune, Esqre. for his information; but that afternoon Nottingham lace curtains were put up at that top window, so closely drawn that not even a chink remained between them. When he beheld them Edmund smiled seraphically.

CHAPTER III

THE PRINCESS

"Thro' light and shadow thou dost range,

Sudden glances, sweet and strange,

Delicious spites and darling angers,

And airy forms of flitting change."

LORD TENNYSON.

There were white curtains at the windows in all the front rooms now. Mr. Wycherly's books were ranged on their appointed shelves and the packing cases removed to the attic. Mrs. Dew was admitted to the study with duster and broom, and it began to look home-like and habitable. Once more did Mr. Wycherly sit at his knee-hole table engaged in his great work upon the Nikomachean ethics. The family was settling down.

"Will everybody come and see us now they know we're here?" asked Edmund, who had invaded the study one afternoon just after luncheon.

"I'm not at all sure that anyone will come and see us," Mr. Wycherly answered serenely. "Why should they?"

"Oh, well, for friendliness. How are we to get to know people if they don't come and see us? Shall we go and see them?"

"Certainly not," Mr. Wycherly said hastily. "That would be pushing and impertinent."

"But I like knowing folks," Edmund persisted. "I knew everybody at Burnhead."

"Burnhead is a little village. Oxford is a big town, and in big towns people are too busy to concern themselves about newcomers."

"Not Mrs. Methuen," Edmund argued. "She takes a great interest in us."

"She is a kind and gracious lady," said Mr. Wycherly, "but you mustn't expect everybody to be like Mrs. Methuen."

"I don't want them to be like her. I want them to be different; but I want some more people to come soon. I know the milkman, of course, and the butcher and two postmen (we'd only one in Burnhead), but that's not enough. You see they don't come in and have a crack. The butcher's an awfully nice man. I wish you knew him, Guardie. Why don't they ever come in?"

"I expect they are too busy. As it is, it seems to me that some people's meat must arrive very late if you have already found time to discover the butcher's amiable qualities during his morning visit."

"You should hear him whistle," Edmund persisted. "I'd give anything to whistle like him."

Mr. Wycherly did not answer. His mental attitude with regard to the butcher's musical efforts was coldly unsympathetic.

"Why do you never whistle, Guardie?"

"I don't feel the smallest desire to whistle."

"But, why don't you?"

Just at this moment Mrs. Dew appeared bearing a tray with a visiting card upon it, while behind her came Montagu, breathless with excitement, to announce that "a lady and a gentleman and a wee girl were waiting in the parlour to see Mr. Wycherly."

On the card were the names of "Mr. and Mrs. William Wycherly."

"There, Edmund," said Mr. Wycherly, "you've got your wish. Here are visitors, and one of them is an old friend," and looking really pleased he hastened downstairs to the parlour, followed by the boys.

Seated in the deep window-seat was a tall young lady with fair hair; beside her was a little girl, and a gentleman was standing on the hearthrug. As Mr. Wycherly came in the lady crossed the room towards him holding out both her hands. She seemed extraordinarily glad to see him, and he held the friendly hands in his for quite a long time, while she laughed and blushed and introduced her husband. Then she turned to the boys: "Do neither of you remember me? Six years is a long time—but you might, Montagu?"

"Weren't you bonnie Margaret?" Montagu asked shyly.

"She is bonnie Margaret," said Mr. Wycherly, "and this is my nephew."

"Nobody is taking any notice of me," said a clear, high voice, and the handshaking group in the middle of the room turned to look at the little figure standing all lonely in the window-seat.

"That is our daughter Herrick," laughed Mrs. Wycherly; "a very important person—quite unused to be overlooked."

This was evident. The small girl stood in the seat silhouetted against the window, a quaint, sedately fearless little figure with a somewhat reproving expression on the round face framed in a Dutch bonnet. Under the bonnet and over her shoulders billowed masses of yellow curls that broke into misty clouds of fine spun floss that caught and held the April sunshine. Her short-waisted coat, reaching nearly to her heels, was of a warm tan-colour, and she carried a large, imposing-looking muff of the same material bordered with fur.

Her mother lifted her down and led her to Mr. Wycherly, who bowed gravely over the small hand extended to him, but did not kiss her, as she evidently expected him to do; for she looked at him with large, trustful eyes, smiling the while a confident smile that showed even white teeth and deliciously uneven dimples in cheeks as fresh and pink as the almond blossom just then bursting into flower.

Mrs. William Wycherly was Lady Alicia's youngest daughter. Montagu vaguely remembered that there was a great fuss at the time of bonnie Margaret's marriage, and that he had heard it whispered that she had run away and that her mother was very angry. So he looked with great interest at the gracious and beautiful young woman who had been so kind to them when they were little. Certainly retribution did not appear to have overtaken her. She looked radiantly well and happy, and Montagu decided that her husband looked kind and pleasant. Herrick stood leaning up against her mother's knee, silently taking stock first of Montagu, then of Edmund, then of Montagu again, turning her gravely scrutinising eyes from one to the other without a trace of embarrassment or shyness.

Presently Mr. Wycherly suggested that the boys should show Herrick the garden.

"Will you go with them, darling?" asked her mother, and Herrick, evidently satisfied with her investigations, declared her willingness to do so.

Once outside the parlour door, the steep, crooked staircase attracted her attention.

"I'd like to go up that; can I, boy?" she asked Edmund.

"Let's take her and show her our attic," he suggested. Edmund loved the attics.

"Shall I carry you?" asked Montagu; "it's a long stair."

"Certainly not," said the little girl with great dignity; "peoples as old as me always walk upstairs."

She fell up a good many times during the ascent, for she kept stepping on her long coat in front, and every time she tripped she said: "Oh, dear, how tahsome!"

At length they reached the attic, and the moment she saw the four-post bed with the curtains she made a dart towards it, crying joyfully, "Oh, what a beautiful castle it will make. Now we can play my game."

She attempted to scramble up on to the bed, but again the coat got in the way and prevented her.

"Please take it off," she commanded, standing quite still, "and my bonnet."

Montagu unbuttoned the coat and untied the strings of the bonnet.

"That's better," she said; "now we can begin."

In a moment she was up on the bed and had darted behind the curtains which she immediately drew closely till she was well hidden.

Montagu and Edmund looked at one another. What in the world did this portend?

Presently the curtains were parted a little, and a round, rosy face appeared in the aperture.

The boys stood at the end of the bed looking awkward and sheepish.

"Go on," she said impatiently; and she stamped her foot. "You must say it now."

"But we don't know what to say. Is it a game like proverbs, or what?" asked Edmund.

Herrick sighed, and stepped out from behind the curtains. "I suppose I must esplain," she said, "but I thought everybody knowed that game; it's my most favourite play. This," she said, waving her hand dramatically, "is a gloomy wood"—mere printers' ink can never depict the darkness and density of that wood as portrayed in Herrick's voice—"and you are a wandering prince."

"Which of us?" asked Edmund; "or are we both princes?"

"No, there can't be two, there can only be one. You'd better be him," she said, pointing to Montagu, "you're the biggest, and the littler one can be his servant."

"A varlet," Montagu, who was just then much under the influence of Sir Walter Scott, suggested helpfully.

"A Scotch varlet, mind," Edmund stipulated.

"And presently you see," continued the little girl as though there had been no interruption of any kind, "a most frowning sort of castle, but just as you're wondering what you'll do there appears at the window——"

"Castles haven't got windows," Edmund objected, "only kind of slits."

"This castle has a casement," Herrick responded with dignity. "Don't interrupt—and the curtains are drawn, but pesenly they are drawn back, and then you see the most beautiful princess you ever dreamed of——"

"And then?" asked Montagu.

"Why, you go down on your knees, of course, and say so. Now, let's begin; you do need such a lot of esplanation."

The princess retired behind her curtains; the prince and the varlet, who manifested an unseemly inclination to giggle, marched about the room.

"By my halidome!" exclaimed the prince, who had determined to play the part after the fashion of his then favourite characters, "this place is stoutly fortified."

"Will we win through, think ye?" asked the varlet familiarly.

"Hush!" said a voice from behind the curtains.

They were parted. First the ravishingly lovely countenance (it really was an adorably pretty little face, intensely solemn and earnest) appeared, then more of the princess, till she stood revealed in short embroidered muslin frock and a blue sash.

Flump! Prince and varlet went down on their knees.

"What light from yonder window breaks?" exclaimed the prince, who had been doing "Romeo and Juliet" at school, and thought the quotation appropriate.

"An' wha'll yon lassie be, prince?" asked the varlet.

"I," said the princess slowly and solemnly, "I am the Princess Hildegarde——"

"Losh me!" interjected the varlet.

"Silence, dog!" said the prince severely. "How came you here, fair lady?"

"I am imprisoned in this dreadful castle," the princess continued plaintively, "by a wicked baron, an enemy of my kingly father."

"Where is the baron, lady? That we may slay him!" valiantly exclaimed the prince.

"Is your faither deed?" further inquired the varlet, who really was shockingly familiar.

"He died"—here the princess faltered and looked almost as though she might weep at any moment—"while I was yet a babe, nigh upon forty years ago."

"That's a long time," murmured the prince thoughtfully.

"It is," the princess agreed, "and meanwhile my evil cousin has usurped the throne—— Now let us do it all over again." Here she spoke in a perfectly natural voice. "Perhaps you'll be a bit better this time. You ought to be much more surprised when I first appear, you ought to be struck dumb with amazement and delight, and then say all sorts of beautiful things. You should see my daddie do it."

"No, no," protested the varlet, as he arose and rubbed his knees, "we've got to find that old baron first and kill him. Wouldn't you like to be the baron now for a change?"

"Certainly not," said the princess with great dignity. "I'm only the princess always; we never have killings or horrid things of that sort. Are you ready?"

"Wouldn't you like to see the garden?" Montagu suggested; "it's very very pretty."

"I've seen plenty of gardens, thank you. This town is all over gardens. Are you ready?"

The princess was once more shrouded by her curtains. Edmund looked despairingly at Montagu.

"Shall we show her our secret place?" he whispered. "We simply can't play that silly old game all over again."

"She's got such a smart frock on," Montagu objected. "Suppose she got dirty."

"What secret place?" asked the princess, emerging from behind the curtains.

"It's a wee tunnel, and you go up it and come out on the roof, but you'd spoil your dress. Are you going to a party, that you're so fine?"

"I'm not fine," the princess cried indignantly. "It's just an or'nary dress; it'll wash. Do show me the secret place."

"Will you promise not to play princess when we get there?" Edmund demanded.

"Not if you don't like it," she answered, looking very surprised; "but it's such a lovely game."

"Hush! they're calling us," Montagu exclaimed; "we must go down."

"But the secret place," cried Herrick. "I must see the secret place."

"You can't now; we must go. Next time, perhaps. All right, Guardie, we're coming. Here, you'd better let me carry you, the stairs are awfully steep. Bring her coat and things, Edmund."

This time the princess consented, and Montagu staggered downstairs bearing this precious and, for him, exceedingly heavy burden.

"What have you been doing, children?" Mrs. Wycherly asked.

"I didn't want to go in the garden," Herrick said as if that explained everything. "So we went upstairs and there was a lovely bed and we played princess, but they're not good. They didn't do it really well. You and daddie are much better."

Mrs. Wycherly looked across at her husband and laughed. "One needs educating up to that game," she said. "I daresay Edmund and Montagu will play it very well when they've got little girls of their own."

"They didn't seem to 'preciate me much," the child said sadly, "but," tolerantly, "they did their best. I like the big one, he's more respectful."

When their visitors had gone, Edmund sought Mr. Wycherly and climbed upon his knee.

"Funny little kid, wasn't she?" he said.

"She is a remarkably beautiful child."

"Yes, she is nice to look at; all that hair's so jolly. We were very good to her, Guardie, really; we did everything she asked us once—but we really couldn't do it all over again."

"Do what all over again?"

"Oh, be princes and admire her, and rubbish. She wouldn't let us kill the wicked baron or anything really jolly like that."

"You've had very little to do with girls, ever," Mr. Wycherly said thoughtfully. "It is rather a pity. I sometimes wish we knew some nice little girls for you to play with. They have, I expect, a refining influence."

"I don't want any refining influences if it's princesses and that sort of thing. I couldn't go on doing it to please anybody."

"She's only a baby, Edmund. You liked all sorts of queer games when you were very little. I'm sure I'd be quite willing to play princes or anything else to please the young lady."

"And go down on your knees?"

"Certainly," said Mr. Wycherly, who, however, looked rather startled, "if it gave her pleasure."

"I suppose we gave her pleasure," Edmund grumbled, "but she didn't seem over-pleased, somehow. I can't think what she wanted, really."

"Perhaps she didn't know herself."

"Oh, yes, she did, for she was so sure we were doing it wrong."

"Perhaps," suggested Mr. Wycherly, with unconscious irony, "it is a better game for two."

"Well, you won't catch Montagu and me playing that game anyhow."

"Who knows—some day," said Mr. Wycherly.

CHAPTER IV

THE BEGGAR MAID

"Who loves me? dearest father, mother sweet,

I speak the names out sometimes by myself,

And make the silence shiver. They sound strange,

As Hindostani to an Ind-born man

Accustomed many years to English speech;

Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,

Which will not leave off singing."

E. B. BROWNING.

That evening, after the princess and her parents had gone, Mrs. Dew asked Mr. Wycherly if she might "pop out" for an hour or so before supper just to run home and see that all was well.

Mrs. Dew always "popped," and according to herself, invariably ran, though such modes of progression seemed hardly in keeping with her stout, comfortable figure.

Before she left, she warned the boys to listen for knocks and rings during her absence—"though 'tisn't likely," she said, "as anyone'll come to the side-door; the tradespeople's all been."

Mr. Wycherly was shut in his study and the boys were preparing to go out into the garden where they assuredly would hear no knocks or rings, when there came a faint and timid rap at the side-door.

Edmund rushed to open it, and there stood a little girl of about twelve, who asked in a modest whisper: "Please, sir, can I see my aunt a minute?"

"Is Mrs. Dew your aunt?" Edmund demanded.

"Yes, sir, please, sir. Can I see her?"

"She's just gone out, not five minutes ago."

"Oh dear," sighed the little girl, "then I must have missed her."

"Was she going to see you, do you think?" Edmund asked. He always took the deepest interest in his fellow creatures.

"I expect so, but there's so many ways one can come. I shall be certain to miss her again going back and then——"

"And then," Edmund repeated.

"She'll be cross with me," the little girl replied, and smiled at Edmund.

Edmund smiled back and a friendly, confidential spirit was at once established.

They looked at each other in silence for a minute.

The visitor was dressed in a brown stuff frock of some stiff, unyielding woolen material. She wore a buff coloured cape reaching to the waist and a hat of black straw, trimmed with a brown ribbon, of that inverted-pie-dish shape seemingly peculiar to female orphans educated in charitable institutions, for no other mortal ever wears such an one.

The pale face under the shadow of the inverted pie-dish was odd and arresting. The eyes, long-lashed and brilliant, were really brown eyes, almost the colour of old, dark sherry; deep-set under delicately pencilled, very black eyebrows. Her mouth was rather large with well-cut full red lips and strong even white teeth; but her face was painfully thin, the cheeks so hollow and the chin so sharp that her eyes dominated everything, were out of proportion, and imparted to the beholder an uncomfortable sense of tragedy and gloom almost painful—until she smiled. Then the slumbering fire in the great eyes was quenched and they looked peaceful and pleasant as clear brown water under sunshine in a Devonshire trout stream.

"Hadn't you better come in and wait for your aunt?" Edmund suggested. "If you go back now you're certain to miss her."

"May I?" asked the little girl, smiling all over her face. "May I? I hope aunt won't mind."

"Come in," said Edmund, and shut the door.

The side-door opened straight into the scullery; then came the kitchen, large, orderly, and comfortable; opening out of that was a housekeeper's room not yet completely furnished. Edmund led his guest through these apartments and across a narrow passage to the dining-room where Montagu was sitting on the floor fastening on his pads.

"Here's Mrs. Dew's niece!" Edmund announced. "This is Montagu," he continued. "What's your name? We can't call you Mrs. Dew's niece all the time."

Montagu arose from the floor and shook hands in solemn silence after the manner of boys.

"My name's Jane-Anne, please, sir," said the little girl.

"My name's Edmund, please, miss," that youth remarked, grinning broadly.

Jane-Anne looked surprised. She saw nothing unusual in her mode of address.

For a minute the three stood and stared at each other.

"Would you like," Edmund asked in tones of honeyed politeness, "to see me bowl to him? I was just going to when you came."

"Please, sir," said Jane-Anne with commendable alacrity, "I should like it very much."

"Perhaps," Montagu suggested, though not over hopefully, "you'd like to field."

"Field," repeated Jane-Anne; "what's that?"

"Run after the ball when he hits it, and throw it back to me," Edmund explained.

"Oh, I could do that—do let me—it would be lovelly."

"Oh, you shall field as much as you like," Edmund promised graciously, and they all went into the garden.

Jane-Anne took off her hat and cape and hung them on the roller. It was then to be seen that her little nose was very straight and almost in a line with her forehead; no "dint," as Edmund called it, between the eyes. And her hair, parted in the centre from her brow to the nape of her neck, was black, immensely long and thick, and tightly plaited in two big pig-tails, each tied with a crumpled bit of brown ribbon.

Jane-Anne could run very fast and was quite a fair catch, but she could not throw, as Montagu put it, "a hang" except in directions wholly undesirable. She very nearly flung one ball through Mr. Wycherly's study window in her endeavours to send it to Edmund bowling at the other end of the lawn. So it was settled that she must roll the ball along the grass, which she did with fair precision.

The grass was wet and spongy after heavy rain that morning. Jane-Anne's boots were heavy and clumsy, and when she slid, as she often did, she peeled the grass right off.

"I say," Montagu exclaimed, "you're making a frightful mess of the grass. I think you'd better stop fielding."

"I'll take them off," Jane-Anne exclaimed eagerly. "I can run much faster in my stockings."

This she did, regardless of the damp and unhindered by either of the boys, who thought it was very "sporting" of her.

"This afternoon," said Montagu, while she was unlacing them, "we had a little girl who insisted on playing at being a princess, and when you came I was afraid you'd want to play something of that sort too; perhaps the beggar maid, for a change."

"I shouldn't ever want to play that," she said very low, and to his dismay he noticed that her mouth drooped at the corners and her eyes were full of tears. She stooped her head over the boot she was unlacing, but Montagu had seen her face.

"Oh, don't," he exclaimed. "Whatever is the matter? I was only in fun and you know, in the story—it's a poem—I read it this very afternoon—the beggar maid became the Queen."

"Did she?" cried Jane-Anne. "Are you sure? How lovelly! I'd like to play at being a princess," she added wistfully. "It's not much fun to play what you are already. You see I am a sort of beggar maid."

"Oh, nonsense," said Montagu, "you're not in rags, your clothes look very strong and comfortable."

"They're strong, but they're not at all comfortable, they're so stiff"; and Jane-Anne rose lightly to her feet holding her arms out straight.

The brown garment was made after a fashion of many years ago—the sleeves and body tight and skimpy and narrow-chested; the skirt unnecessarily full and heavy.

"I think you're rather like Mrs. Noah," said Edmund, "only you've more hair and petticoats."

Jane-Anne dropped her arms, stooped, and picked up the boots. "Aren't they frightful?" she said. "That's the asylum. We all have to wear them." Whereupon she cast the boots violently away from her and they bounded into the midst of a herbaceous border.

"Now," she said, with a little dancing movement indicative of relief, "you'll see that I can run."

"What was that you said about an asylum?" Edmund asked suspiciously. "I thought only mad people went to asylums."

"It's the Bainbridge Asylum for female orphans," Jane-Anne explained. "I'm female and I'm an orphan, and I wish I wasn't. I'm at school there and I hate it. But I'm generally ill, so I have to go to the hospital, and there it's lovelly."

"Why are you ill?" asked Edmund.

"It's so cold. If I go on being ill any more," she added hopefully, "they won't keep me. It's because I'm an orphan I have to go—it makes it easier for aunt."

"But we're orphans too and we don't go to asylums," Edmund objected.

"Ah," said Jane-Anne, "you're rich, you see."

"Indeed we're not," said Montagu. "We're very poor really; Aunt Esperance said so."

"Poor!" echoed Jane-Anne scornfully, "and live in that beautiful house and have Aunt Martha for a servant. Oh, no, you can't be poor—not really."

"You see, there's Guardie, he takes care of us," Montagu explained, "but we're really orphans, too, you know."

"Are you? I'm so sorry," and she looked it.

"Oh, you needn't be a bit sorry for us. We're very jolly, thank you," and Edmund spoke in rather an offended tone. Pity was the last thing he expected or desired.

"I beg your pardon," she said quickly. "I know it's quite different for you; you're gentry, you see."

The boys glanced at one another and were horribly uncomfortable. In some queer, subconscious way they felt that they had unaccountably and unintentionally been "snobby" to Jane-Anne.

"Come on," said Edmund, "we're wasting time."

The game was keen and exciting. Jane-Anne flew about on her slender stockinged feet, and in spite of the stiff brown dress, there was something singularly fleet and graceful in her movements.

The pleasant pinky light had already changed to grey when from the house there came the sound of a hand-bell rung vigorously.

"Mercy!" exclaimed Edmund, "that's for us to wash. Mrs. Dew must be home and it's nearly supper-time."

Montagu was already half-way to the house when Jane-Anne caught Edmund by the arm, exclaiming, "Oh, let me get my boots. Don't go without me, and don't say I took them off. I don't know what Aunt'd say. I'm sure she'll think it forward of me to play with you."

"Rubbish," said Edmund. "Hurry up. We asked you, and I hope you'll come often. You'd learn to chuck up a ball in time, and your running's simply ripping."

"Can the princess one throw balls?" Jane-Anne asked as she laced a boot at lightning speed.

"I don't know. I shouldn't think so; she's a very little kid, you know."

"I should like to see her; is she like a princess, really?"

"Well, she is rather. She has a demandly sort of way as if she expected everybody to do as she likes. You could see her if you came to-morrow morning. They're coming then, I know."

"I'd love to, but what would aunt say? I'm certain she wouldn't let me; not in the morning when she's so busy."

"You come to the front door and I'll let you in myself and take you up to the attic. She's certain to want to go back there. She doesn't seem to care for gardens."

"Oh, I do," cried Jane-Anne; "gardens are lovelly; but I'll come," she added excitedly. "I'll wait across the road, then you can see me from the window and let me in. Mind you don't forget."

They ran back to the house and Edmund escorted Jane-Anne as far as the kitchen, where Mrs. Dew was standing at the fireplace dishing up.

"Jane-Anne came to see you, Mrs. Dew," Edmund announced loudly from the doorway, "but you'd just gone, so we asked her in to wait till you came back."

Mrs. Dew turned hastily and beheld her niece standing just behind her.

"But I've been back over an hour," Mrs. Dew exclaimed. "Wherever have you been since, Jane-Anne?"

"We asked her to play cricket with us," Edmund explained. "We never heard you come in. Good-bye, Jane-Anne, I must go and wash."

Wagging his curly head meaningly in token of the assignation for the morrow, Edmund departed and Jane-Anne was left face to face with her aunt.

"Well!" that good woman ejaculated. "You've given me a pretty turn. I couldn't think where you was gone; evening and all, and then to think you've been all this time playing with the young gentlemen like one of theirselves, and me never so much as dreaming where you was. What possessed you to come at all, Jane-Anne?"

"I was lonely, Aunt Martha, I wanted to see you."

"You might have seen me over an hour ago if you'd a' chose. Well, now you must run back home before it gets dark. I can't let you wait for me to take you, there's all them dinner things to wash up. How hot you are child! Mind you don't catch cold, and school beginning next week."

Jane-Anne looked wistfully at the sizzling cutlets in the frying-pan. She had started off before her tea and was very hungry. Her aunt had turned again to the range and was absorbed in lifting her cutlets out one by one and setting them to drain on a dish covered with white paper. As she carefully placed the last one, she turned and saw the flushed, wistful little face under the shadow of the inverted pie-dish.

"There, child," she said impatiently, "don't dawdle, it's late enough as it is, and Miss Morecraft 'll be in a fine taking where you can have got to."

"Good-night, Aunt Martha," Jane-Anne said obediently, and held up her face to be kissed.

Mrs. Dew stooped and kissed the child with great kindness and felt in the pocket of her skirt. "You buy a cake for your supper," she said, pressing a penny into Jane-Anne's hand, "on your way back. I can't give you anything here for the food's not mine, and to take my employer's victuals is what I never have done nor never will."

Jane-Anne flung her arms round her aunt's neck. "I do love you, Aunt Martha," she whispered chokily.

"There, there, do get home, and remember that if so be as I'm out when you call, you're to go away again and not come in as bold as brass as if you was a friend of the family—playing with the young gentlemen and all. Folks ought to keep to their proper stations."

"But he asked me to come and play," Jane-Anne expostulated.

"Law bless you, Master Edmund'd ask in a tramp off the road, he's that full of caddle. Now look sharp, child, and get home."

Jane-Anne let herself out at the side-door and went through under the archway into the street. It was quite deserted, and as she passed the dining-room window she stopped, and pressing her face against the glass, looked in.

The electric light above the table had a rose-coloured shade and filled the room with a warm, soft light. A bright fire was burning on the hearth, for the evenings were still cold and a shrewd wind blew down the empty street. To Jane-Anne, shivering now after being much too hot, the room looked inexpressibly comfortable and cheery.

Mr. Wycherly, his white hair shining with a silvery radiance, was standing with Montagu, newly promoted to a dinner-jacket on the hearth-rug. His hand was on the boy's shoulder, and he smiled down at him, for Montagu was talking eagerly. There was evidently such perfect confidence and affection between what Jane-Anne called "the beautiful old gentleman" and the boy for whom she had just been fielding, that she felt a passionate desire to be there too. Surely anyone who looked so gracious and benign would have a kindly word for her. Should she rap at the window and attract their attention? Somehow she was certain that neither of them would be cross. Her eyes filled with tears, and the figures standing on the hearth-rug became blurred and indistinct, but she saw her aunt come in and cross towards the window to pull down the blind. Jane-Anne darted away, the big tears chasing each other down her cheeks.

"I wish I was that kind of orphan!" sobbed Jane-Anne.

CHAPTER V

THEIR MEETING

"For may not a person be only five,

And yet have the neatest of taste alive?

As a matter of fact, this one has views

Of the strictest sort as to frocks and shoes."

AUSTIN DOBSON.

Little Herrick had no companions of her own age except for an occasional visit to cousins. Therefore did she invent comrades for herself and sternly impose them upon her family.

There was "Umpy dear" who, as his name suggested, was a meek, inefficient sort of person, often in trouble of various kinds, but always entirely amiable and desirous of pleasing. Quite other was "Mr. Woolykneeze," a stern, characterful personality who was quoted as an authority on all questions of manners and deportment. Even Janet, the commonsensical, trembled before Mr. Woolykneeze. One day at tea, having toothache, she had ventured to leave a piece of crust upon her plate, when Herrick remarked it and said sternly, "Mr. Woolykneeze thinks it's very impolite to leave bits, 'specially crusts," and poor Janet was fain to soak the crust in her tea and mumble it that way rather than offend this mysterious and invisible censor.

When asked the age of "Umpy dear," Herrick always persisted that he was "three months and one day." He never grew any older and his social solecisms were surely excusable in one of such tender age. "Mrs. Miff" was "Umpy dear's" mother, and her character was believed to have been founded on that of a charwoman who occasionally came to the house. Like her offspring she was meek and rather feckless, frequently arousing the wrath of Mr. Woolykneeze by her untidy and careless habits.

No one knew whence Herrick got the names or how she divined their various characters, but the people were there and had come to stay, and her family had to put up with them.

Her visit to Oxford opened up whole vistas of new possibilities. Here were two real boys with whom she had been allowed to play. It is true that they did not fall into her scheme with that instant understanding and obedience to which she was accustomed from her parents, but still they played after a fashion, a new and piquant fashion, and Herrick went back to the King's Arms after her visit to Holywell chattering incessantly of "Monkagu" and "Emmund," and demanding an instant return to their society. She wept bitterly when she found she could not go back that night, and declared that Mr. Woolykneeze and Umpy dear were equally upset. Her father suggested that these gentlemen might stroll round by themselves, when Herrick, regarding him with tearful astonishment, sobbed out: "They'd never be so unkind as to go wivout me. Besides, Umpy dear might spill something on your uncle's best carpet. Can't I take them?"

"Not to-night, I fear."

"Why?"

"Because, you see, we've been already; it would be troublesome to go twice."

"Why would it be troublesome? I want to play with those little boys again."

"They're not very little boys, you know. They're a great deal bigger than you are. Perhaps they don't care to play with little girls."

At this Herrick opened her tearful eyes wide, repeating in astonishment, "Not care to play wiv me? Why not?"

"Well, you see, boys don't always care for the same games that girls like."

"But they're nice boys."

"I'm glad to hear it; still, you know, even nice boys don't always care to play with little girls."

Herrick sighed deeply. It was a horrid suggestion, the more so that she felt secretly assured that the princess game had not been a wild success.

"I want to see the varlet again," she persisted.

"Which is the varlet?"

"The littler one. I do want him to play wiv me."

"Perhaps he will to-morrow."

"D'rectly after breakfas', mind; you promise."

William Wycherly promised, and Herrick went to bed to dream that "Emmund" and "Monkagu" were walking down Holywell arm-in-arm with Umpy dear and Mr. Woolykneeze, and that they all four called at the hotel to take her for a walk in St. John's Gardens.

Next morning Herrick woke very early. Janet, her Scottish nurse, was having a fortnight's holiday, therefore at that time her mother was her sole guardian and attendant. Her bed was in a little dressing-room off that of her mother, the door between the two rooms being left open.

For a little while Herrick was content to sit up and wonder at the floors of the King's Arms Hotel, which are not as ordinary floors, but slope up and down in all sorts of unexpected directions. But she soon got tired of this, and so effectually roused her devoted parents that the three of them were down in the coffee-room and had finished breakfast by half-past eight.

"Now let us go and see your uncle, daddie dear," Herrick suggested as soon as she was lifted down from her chair. It seemed so extraordinary to her that anyone as old as her father should have an uncle, and she never failed to lay great stress upon the pronoun.

"We can't possibly invade them so early as this," Margaret said firmly; "they're probably not downstairs yet."

"Umpy dear thinks they're up and finished breakfast," Herrick remarked in a detached, impersonal tone, "and waiting for me."

"Well, I must beg to differ from Umpy dear. We said we'd call about ten, and it won't be ten for an hour and a half yet. I must write some letters, and you must amuse yourself somehow while I do it. What toys will you have?"

"I'll look out of the window, sank you," Herrick remarked with dignity, and climbed upon a chair that she might see over the wire blind.

Her mother gave one amused glance at the small offended back turned towards her and went upstairs to get her writing-case.

William Wycherly, seeing his daughter apparently engrossed in her inspection of the street, strolled to the bureau to look up trains, for they were to leave that afternoon.

No sooner was he out of sight than Herrick, muttering something to the effect that "Mr. Woolykneeze knows they're waiting," scrambled down from the chair and tip-toed out to the hall and thence into the street.

No one saw her, for none of the other sojourners at the King's Arms were down, and at that moment there was not even a waiter in the hall.

It was a perfect April morning. The sun shone clear and warm, and a shy, caressing wind lifted Herrick's curls and turned them to a haze of golden floss as she stepped daintily to the pavement and looked up street and down street carefully. Then, as fast as her sturdy legs would carry her, she ran till she reached Mr. Wycherly's gabled house.

But there she was met by a difficulty, for she could reach neither knocker nor bell. For a moment she stood undecided in the doorway, but she was not lacking in resource. She couldn't quite see into the windows but she could reach them with her hand. She selected that on the left-hand side of the door and tapped on the glass. No response; evidently there was no one in that room.

She tried the other. Still no one came to see who was there.

A passing boy, who noted her efforts, inquired good-naturedly: "Want to get in, missie?"

"Please! Would you ring for me?" she asked, smiling up at him in bewitching fashion; "there doesn't seem to be anybody in those rooms."

The boy rang loudly, knocked like a postman, and went up the street, where he waited a few doors off to see what happened.

The door was opened.

Mrs. Dew looked down at this hatless, golden-haired person in an elaborate blue linen smock the colour of her eyes, and recognised yesterday's visitor.

"Come in, my dear," she said hospitably. "They're none of 'em down yet, but I can hear the young gentlemen hollerin' and rampagin', so they won't be long——" "Parents want to get her out of the way for a bit, I expect," she thought to herself, "her mamma must get pretty tired of it without no nurse."

Herrick followed Mrs. Dew into the dining-room, where breakfast was laid. "One minute, my dear," said that good woman, "I must just pop back to my bacon and eggs, then I'll come and see to you."

But Herrick had not come to see Mrs. Dew. No sooner was she left alone than she sought the steep, narrow staircase and began to climb upstairs, whispering as she went, "You'd better take my hand, Umpy dear."

Two doors on the landing were open. The bathroom faced her, empty, and very wet. She walked straight through the second open door on the other side of the landing and came upon Montagu brushing his hair at the glass while Edmund, still in his shirt-sleeves, was practising a handspring on the end of his bed.

Montagu saw her reflected in the mirror and in speechless astonishment watched her as she paused well inside the doorway, announcing genially, "We've all three come."

Edmund's feet dropped to the floor with a flump.

"Mercy goodness!" Montagu ejaculated, and dashed for the door that led into Mr. Wycherly's room. On this he thumped loudly; without waiting for permission to enter, he opened it just wide enough to thrust in his head, and repeated, "They've all three come," in a penetrating whisper.

Mr. Wycherly, who was shaving, dropped his razor and turned a soapy and astonished countenance towards Montagu, exclaiming, "What! al——!" when he hastily changed his remark to: "They've come to breakfast with us, have they? How exceedingly kind and friendly; run down at once and ask Mrs. Dew to lay three more places."

Herrick staring at Edmund, heard this and said slowly: "They don't generally lay for them."

"What?" cried Edmund, immensely interested. "Don't you have plates and knives and things?"

"I do," said Herrick; "at least not knives 'cept a silver one, but they never do. They will be pleased."

"But do you mean to tell me," Edmund exclaimed, appalled at the eccentricity of the Wycherly ménage as revealed by their daughter, "that they eat things right off the cloth? Whatever do they do when there's gravy?"

"They never has gravy, poor dears," said Herrick sadly.

Edmund sighed. As old Elsa would have said, it was "ayont him"; and they both looked so nice too. It was impossible to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Wycherly gnawing cutlets without so much as a plate between them. He got into his waistcoat and jacket in thoughtful silence. Montagu, who had not paid any attention to these astonishing revelations, being filled with hospitable concern as to whether there would be sufficient bacon and eggs for three extra persons, gave his hair one final thump with the brush and prepared to go downstairs.

"Stop!" cried Edmund; "you haven't said your prayers; hurry up!" Both boys knelt down by the bed, side by side, while Herrick watched their bowed heads with solemn interest.

"Why don't you begin?" she asked impatiently after a minute's silence.

"I've done," Edmund announced cheerfully, arising from his knees, when Montagu followed suit and rushed downstairs.

"But you didn't say anything."

"We don't say prayers out loud. It's only very little children say them out loud."

"Oh!" she said, as though suddenly enlightened. "Umpy dear says his very loud, but Mr. Woolykneeze looks into his hat like a grown-up genpleman; you can't hear a fing."

"But," Edmund objected, "one hasn't always got a hat in the morning," and opening Mr. Wycherly's door a very little, he called through: "I say, Guardie, do you always say your prayers into a hat?"

"Really, Edmund," said poor Mr. Wycherly, much perturbed by this second interruption, "I do so dislike doors being opened while I am shaving, especially when as in this instance——"

Edmund banged the door.

"I'm sure he doesn't," he said confidently. "He can't, for his hat's downstairs. P'raps that Mr. What's-is-name you mentioned has a special kind."

"Mr. Woolykneeze has hundreds of hats," Herrick announced magnificently.

"What a lot of room they must take up," said Edmund, much impressed.

"They do," said Herrick, "rooms and rooms."

"Is yon Mr. Woolykneeze a relation?" Edmund asked.

Herrick looked thoughtful. "Not exactly," she said slowly, "but he's a dear fend."

"How many pairs of trousers has he?"

Here was a poser. Herrick was not yet very familiar with the science of numbers. "I've not seen them all," she said cautiously; "he wears different ones every day. Let's come downstairs," she added quickly lest he should ask more inconvenient questions. "You may show me the garden till bretfus is ready if you like."

By the time Mr. Wycherly came down, six places were laid for breakfast and Mrs. Dew had cooked three extra portions of bacon and eggs. She rang the bell loudly and the boys with little Herrick came in from the garden.

"Perhaps you'd better run along to the King's Arms, Edmund, and tell my nephew and his wife that breakfast is ready," said Mr. Wycherly. "I thought, my dear," he added, turning towards Herrick, "that you said your father and mother had come. I hope they haven't gone away in despair because none of us were down."

Herrick looked up at him with candid, forget-me-not blue eyes.

"No," she said gravely, "I never said they'd come for they didn't."

"But you did!" Montagu exclaimed. "You said, 'We've all three come' when you first came upstairs."

"So we have," she said. "Mr. Woolykneeze and Umpy dear and me; not mummy and daddie. I 'spect this is him now," as a loud knock and ring came at the front door.

And sure enough it was William Wycherly, so relieved to see his daughter safe that he forgot altogether to scold her for running away.

Margaret, thinking her husband was in charge of Herrick, had not hurried down and he, returning to the empty coffee-room, concluded that Herrick had been fetched upstairs by her mother. It was not till Margaret came down that they discovered she had apparently vanished into space. William instantly fell into a panic and was for summoning a detective at once, when Margaret calmly interposed with the suggestion that he should first look for his daughter in his uncle's house. After considerable explanation which included the important personalities of Mr. Woolykneeze and Umpy dear, William was fain to go back to the King's Arms without his daughter, and Herrick sat at Mr. Wycherly's right hand, raised high in her chair upon a dictionary and Cruden's Concordance, and had breakfast all over again "wivout a bib" as she joyfully announced. The blue smock also bore testimony to that fact when the meal was over. The extra bacon and eggs were not wasted; Montagu and Edmund consumed the lot.

By the time breakfast was over it was nearly ten o'clock, and Edmund went to the front door to look for Jane-Anne. Sure enough she was there waiting in a doorway just down the street. Jane-Anne saw him and came out from her doorway, advancing rather timidly.

"Where's Aunt Martha?" she whispered.

"Upstairs, making beds," Edmund answered, "so we can't go to the attics, but you can come into the garden. There's only one room looks out into the garden and that's Guardie's study. He's gone there now so Mrs. Dew won't be in that."

"Are you sure?" Jane-Anne whispered again. "She'd be awfully vexed if she saw me."

"Come on. That kid is here and she can't stop long for we're all going out on the river. Hurry up if you really want to see her."

Jane-Anne came in sideways, as though by that means she made herself less conspicuous.

Herrick and Montagu were standing on the lawn under an apple tree, looking at some trumpet daffodils that were growing at its root. Herrick, very gently, was lifting each yellow bell to look inside it.

"Fairies live in these," she was saying, "but it's such a beautiful morning, I 'spect they've all flown away. You have to be very early to catch a fairy. Who's that with Edmund and what's she come for?"

"To see you, I think," Montagu replied. "Jane-Anne's her name and she's Mrs. Dew's niece."

Jane-Anne looked more haggard than ever this morning; pale to ghastliness with dark shadows under her great eyes, she was singularly unattractive. Little Herrick felt both puzzled and repelled, but Margaret's teaching held good and the child walked forward holding out her hand with a little gracious air that was very captivating.

"How do you do?" said Herrick.

To her surprise, this strange-looking person dropped on one knee before her and taking the eggy little hand in both her own, kissed it.

"You're quite right," Jane-Anne remarked to Montagu over her shoulder, "she is like a princess."

"You may kiss me if you like," said Herrick graciously.

"If you please, miss, I'd rather you'd kiss me if you will," said Jane-Anne humbly. "I'd like to think anything so pretty as you had kissed me."

There was something so wistful and pathetic in the pale face that gazed so longingly into her own that little Herrick's warm heart was touched and she flung her arms round Jane-Anne's neck and kissed her heartily.

"Thank you," said Jane-Anne as she rose up to her feet. "I shall never forget it, never."

"Now I," interposed Edmund, who had looked on with astounded disapprobation at this display of sentiment, "I should loathe and abominate anyone who kissed me and I should try to forget it as soon as ever I could."

"So should I," Montagu agreed, "rather—but I suppose girls are different."

"Course they are," Herrick chimed in; "quite different and much better and more precious. Daddie says so."

This point of view did not appeal to the boys.

"I don't know about 'precious,'" Edmund said scornfully. "It depends what you mean by precious."

"I'm precious," Herrick explained, "very, very precious. That's why they were so afraid they'd lost me this morning, 'cause I'm so precious."

"I'm not," said Jane-Anne. "Female orphans never are so far as I can make out, but I'd like to be. Oh, it would be lovelly!"

Herrick had been staring hard at Jane-Anne for some minutes and at last could contain herself no longer.

"Why," she demanded, "do you wear such a funny hat? Do you like it?"

"Why d'you wear no hat at all?" Montagu interposed, vaguely aware that Herrick's question was not tactful.

"I wear a bonnet generally," Herrick remarked with dignity, "but I came out without it this morning 'cause they were in such a hurry. D'you like my smock?" she asked, turning to Jane-Anne. "Mummy made it."

"I like everything about you," Jane-Anne answered, with commendable enthusiasm. "I think you're a dear darling, and I hate all my clothes, but I can't go about without any because people would stare, beside it's generally too cold." And though the sun was shining hot on the lawn, Jane-Anne shivered.

Montagu looked at his watch.

"We'll have to go and get ready," he said. "We're all going on the river this morning—they're going away this afternoon—and I promised to take her back to the hotel at half-past ten to have her face washed. I wish you were coming too," he added kindly, "but it's not our party."

"Good-bye, little girl," said Herrick, "and I hope you'll soon have a nicer hat, a really pretty one." And again Herrick kissed Jane-Anne.

"I'll let you out at the garden door," said Edmund, "then we shan't run into Mrs. Dew."

Quite silently Jane-Anne followed him to the end of the garden where there was a door in the wall. It was seldom used and the key was stiff, but by great efforts with both hands, Edmund managed to turn it.

"Come again, soon," he said hospitably, "and we'll have some more cricket."

Jane-Anne murmured something unintelligible and passed out with bent head, the pie-dish effectually concealing her face. Edmund locked the door behind her and ran back to the house.

Outside the garden, in Saville Road, it was very quiet. It is true there was a distant rumble of carts from Holywell and a thrush was singing in one of Mr. Wycherly's apple-trees, but of human kind there wasn't a sign.

Jane-Anne went down on her knees, her shoulder pressed close against the garden door.

"Dear God," she prayed, "I do so want to be precious too. Please let me be precious to somebody. Please do."

CHAPTER VI

MR. WYCHERLY ADDS TO HIS RESPONSIBILITIES

"Some cheeses are made o' skim milk and some o' new milk, and it's no matter what you call 'em, you may tell which is which by the look and the smell." Adam Bede.

Next day Mrs. Methuen took the boys out on the river for the whole afternoon. She invited Mr. Wycherly to go too, but the previous day had been his first experience of his wards as oarsmen, and he came to the conclusion that he preferred their society on land.

He was sitting at his writing-table in his study. The great oriel window was open and he could see that there were already patches of pink on the largest apple-tree, while the pear-trees had shed their snowy blossoms and shone brilliantly green against the blue and cloudless sky.

It was a pleasant prospect from the study window: the long irregular strip of garden, with smoothly shaven lawn in the centre and winding paths among borders where vegetables, fruit and flowers grew side by side in perfect amity.

The afternoon was singularly quiet, and, knowing Mr. Wycherly's habits, one would have felt that here was an excellent opportunity for his great work on the Nikomachean ethics which had been sadly neglected during the last strenuous weeks. Yet he neither took up the pen nor did he open any of the fat, calf-bound books piled one upon another at his elbow.

He sat very still, his long white hands resting idly on the arms of his chair, his kind eyes dreamy, his whole attitude eloquent of contented tranquillity.

Presently there came a modest tap at the study door, followed by the entrance of Mrs. Dew with her small round tray, and on it a rather dirty piece of paper which she presented to Mr. Wycherly with the announcement: "A young person to see you, sir."

Mr. Wycherly, roused from his agreeable reverie, looked bewildered.

"A young person?" he repeated vaguely, "to see me. What sort of a young person, Mrs. Dew?"

Mrs. Dew's face preserved the non-committal expression of one who has seen service in really good families, as she replied: "A young woman, sir, from the Registry Office, I should suppose."

Mr. Wycherly took the piece of paper off the tray and read as follows:

"M. Fairfield exp.: general character six months twelve months plain cooking age 23 very respectable."

There were no stops.

He looked beseechingly at Mrs. Dew, but her eyes were bent upon the carpet and she waited his pleasure a perfect monument of respectful detachment. Poor Mr. Wycherly had forgotten all about his search for the accomplished general. Somewhere in the back of his brain there lurked the consciousness that Mrs. Dew was only a temporary blessing, really there "to oblige Mrs. Methuen," till such time as a suitable and permanent servant should be obtained; but she fitted into her niche so perfectly, her sway was so benevolent, if a trifle despotic, that he began to look upon her as part of the established order of things, and, since his one visit to the High Class Registry Office, had made no effort of any kind to find her successor.

"Couldn't you see her for me, Mrs. Dew?" he entreated almost abjectly. "You could judge of her capabilities far better than I can."

Mrs. Dew raised her eyes and looked Mr. Wycherly full in the face, shaking her head the while: "No, sir, I think not, sir; it would be more satisfactory for all parties if you was to see the young person yourself."

Mr. Wycherly sighed heavily. "Do you think she seems likely to be suitable?"

Mrs. Dew's wholesome, good-natured face once more became sphinx-like. "I really couldn't say, sir. The appearance of the young women of the present day is often very much against them. We can only hope they're better servants than they look. Shall I show her up here, sir?"

"Please, Mrs. Dew, but I do wish you could have interviewed her for me—wait one moment. Could you kindly suggest some of the questions I ought to ask her?"

Mr. Wycherly's voice betrayed his extreme perturbation and he swung round in his revolving chair almost as though he had thoughts of laying violent hands on Mrs. Dew to prevent her departure.

She paused on the threshold and an imaginative person might perhaps have discovered a trace of pity in the glance she bent on Mr. Wycherly's agitated figure.

"The usual questions, sir, will, I should think, be quite sufficient."

And she shut the door behind her.

"The usual questions."

But what on earth were the usual questions? Mr. Wycherly could only think of those in the church Catechism. He picked up the dirty scrap of paper and read it again. "Exp." conveyed nothing to his mind. They were coming upstairs and he had no plan of campaign arranged. He felt absolutely forlorn and helpless. Suppose the young person didn't go away of her own accord? How could he ever suggest to her that the interview was at an end? He found himself longing for the moral support of Edmund, who at all events, never lacked the power of asking questions; and no sort of young person, or, for the matter of that, old person either, could inspire him with the unreasoning terror his guardian felt at the prospect of the tête-à-tête thus imminent.

Mrs. Dew opened the door.

"The young person," she announced, and her disapproving expression changed to one of downright horror as Mr. Wycherly rose to his feet to receive his visitor.

She was a short, stout young woman, dressed in a bright blue coat and skirt of the shade known by drapers as "Royal." Her hat was large and was trimmed with tumbled pink roses. Her hair was frizzy and flamboyant and her boots creaked—Mr. Wycherly thought to himself—infernally.

"Pray be seated," he said courteously.

The young woman selected a chair as far off as possible and giggled affably.

"I understand," he began in a faint voice, "that you think you would be able to undertake the duties of—er—thorough general servant—that I believe is the correct term?"

"I always 'ave been general," the young woman replied, "though I did think of betterin' myself, but Mrs. Councer she said as yours was a heasy place with no missus naggin' at you an' I thought it might suit me so I come along to have a look at things. It's a largish 'ouse for one but I suppose you don't 'ave much cookin' and waitin'."

"But there are three of us," Mr. Wycherly interposed eagerly. "I'm afraid that you would find it too much. You are rather young to undertake the entire management of this household. You see there would be the housekeeping to do—ordering, books to pay and so on, as well as the actual work."

"Oh, I could do all that," she replied confidently. "I'll do the shoppin' meself. I likes a run out between my reg'lar times, an' I'd see they didn't cheat you in the books, puttin' down things you've never 'ad."

Miss Fairfield smiled happily at Mr. Wycherly. She liked his looks. She was sure he would be easy to live with and probably would be unaware of the existence of the followers. In common with every woman ever brought into personal relations with him, she was certain that he was in need of protection from the others, and decided there and then that it was her mission to see that he wasn't put upon by anybody else.

"When will you be requirin' my services?" she asked.

Mr. Wycherly gasped. "I should require to consider the question," he said feebly, "and it is usual, is it not, to give some——"

"My last mistress'll give me a character. I was there six months and she almost went down on 'er knees for me to stop; but I couldn't, it was such an 'eavy place."

"Are you a good plain cook?" Mr. Wycherly asked, feeling here indeed was a leading question; some of Lady Alicia's instructions were gradually recurring to his mind. "Can you—er—do fish?"

"Fry fish, why bless you, sir, my last place was a fried-fish shop, that's why I left. One gets tired of frying morning, noon and night. I can do plain roast and boiled and milk puddin's an' that, but I don't profess to do pastry."

"Thank you," said Mr. Wycherly, and paused. To get rid of her, he was on the point of saying that he would consider her qualifications and let her know his decision later, when his delicate sense of honour pointed out that such a course would not be quite straightforward dealing. She was a terrible young woman and his fastidious soul revolted from the very thought of the fried-fish shop, but she was young and she was a woman; it would not be fair to let her depart with the impression that she was a likely applicant when nothing on earth could induce him to employ her.

"I fear," he added gently, "that you are not quite experienced enough for us here, and therefore I will not trouble your late mistress with inquiries. I am sorry you should have had to come in vain—were you to put any expense?"

The girl gave a short laugh. "I've only come about half a mile," she said. "I'm sorry I don't suit you; I think I could be very 'appy in your situation."

Poor Mr. Wycherly looked most unhappy. He rose and rang the bell, saying:

"Mrs. Dew will show you the way out." He opened the door for her with the gravest courtesy and she creaked downstairs, wondering why she had not demanded at least "'arf a crownd" for expenses. "I'd 'a' got it too," she thought to herself, "but it never entered me 'ead to say nothin' to 'im but the plain truth an' 'im so civil and affable."

Mr. Wycherly went back to his chair and reached for a pamphlet dealing with the philosophy of Eubulides, which he thought might be soothing, but he had got no further than the statement that, "in Eubulides positive faith was superseded by delight in his own subtlety," when there came another knock at his door and again Mrs. Dew presented herself.

"I beg your pardon, sir, for venturing to intrude upon you," Mrs. Dew said respectfully, "but did you come to any arrangement with the young person?"

Mr. Wycherly laid down Eubulides. "Oh, dear, no," he groaned, "she was quite impossible. A most well-meaning girl, I am sure—but——"

"I feared so, sir, from her very flashy appearance, but one always hopes they may be better than their looks. Being only temporary I should like to know you'd found someone really suitable."

"Look here, Mrs. Dew," said Mr. Wycherly, suddenly taking heart of grace. "Why should you be only temporary? Could you not settle down with us? If you find the work too much when my wards are at home why not get a young girl to help you?"

"You're very kind, sir," said Mrs. Dew, fingering her apron and looking embarrassed, "but you see, I'm not without encumbrances. Husband I've none, children I've none, but what I have got is a niece and my bits of things. I'm bound to keep a little home for her in the holidays, that's why I can't take a permanent situation. You see, no one wants a child of twelve tacked on to a servant for weeks at a time."

"But listen, Mrs. Dew, there is the cottage—the little cottage off the kitchen where your bedroom is now—why not bring your things and furnish it and the housekeeper's room and there would be a home for your niece?"

Mrs. Dew turned very red. "It's most uncommon kind of you, sir," she said, "but I shouldn't like to take advantage of you. You see, it's just when the young gentlemen would be at home her holidays come, and perhaps——"

"That, surely, would be the very time when she could be of most use to you."

Mrs. Dew looked queerly at Mr. Wycherly, then, as though forcing herself to speak against her will, she said slowly: "You see, sir, I must be straightforward with you. If Jane-Anne was like some girls—like what I was myself—I shouldn't 'esitate to accept your very kind offer, for it would make a great difference to me. I hate choppin' and changin' and if I may make so bold, sir, you need a staid person here to look after things, but Jane-Anne's the sort of child what crops up continual. I couldn't promise for 'er as she'd keep 'erself to 'erself like she ought. I'd do my best, sir, to keep her in our own part of the 'ouse, but——"

Mrs. Dew paused and shook her head. Whenever she was very much in earnest she dropped into the speech of her youth; the aitchless, broad-vowelled talk of the Cotswold country whence she came.

"But, I shall like to see your niece about the house," said Mr. Wycherly. "It will be pleasant to have a young girl growing up in our midst, good for me and for the boys."

Again Mrs. Dew gave Mr. Wycherly that queer look, half-scornful, half-admirative.

"You mustn't think, sir, that there's any real 'arm in Jane-Anne," she said earnestly. "There's nothing of the minx about her, I will say that; but—I don't know how to put it without being hard on the child, and yet it wouldn't be fair to you, sir, to let her come without telling you——"

Again Mrs. Dew paused and Mr. Wycherly looked rather anxious.

"She do make a sort of stir wherever she do go and that's the long and short of it." And Mrs. Dew relapsed into broadest Gloucestershire again as she blurted out this startling fact.

"Stir," Mr. Wycherly repeated, "stir. Do you mean that she is a particularly noisy child?"

"No, sir, not that. Jane-Anne isn't that; but she does things no other child ever thinks of doing and you can't seem to guard against it. The very first month she was at the asylum, she went and put 'er foot through a staircase window trying to see some soldiers as was passing. They had a board meeting about it."

Mr. Wycherly laughed. "It is unusual to put one's foot through a window, but surely that was an accident and not a moral offence?"

"It was a staircase window, as stretched all down one side of that wing," Mrs. Dew said solemnly, "and the bannisters was up against it, and Jane-Anne she leant over cranin' 'er 'ead to see them soldiers, and she lost 'er balance and swung back and drove 'er foot right through and cut 'er leg so it bled dreadful."

"Poor child," said Mr. Wycherly, "that's one thing she is quite safe from here. There will be no temptation for her to put her feet through any windows. Has she lost both her parents, Mrs. Dew?"

"That's another thing," said Mrs. Dew, dropping her voice mysteriously, "as I feel you ought to know, and that is, Jane-Anne's father was a Grecian."

"Really," Mr. Wycherly remarked, evidently quite unmoved by what Mrs. Dew considered a most damaging fact. "A Greek; how interesting! What was his name?"

"Staff rides," Mrs. Dew answered promptly. "At least that's what I call it, but he called it something longer. I've tried to English it as much as possible to match her really respectable Christian name."

"Do you happen to remember how it was spelt?" Mr. Wycherly asked.

"Yes, sir, S-T-A-V-R-I-D-E-S."

"Ah," Mr. Wycherly exclaimed; "now I've got it. Stavrides. Quite a common Greek name. What part of Greece did he come from?"

"Athens, sir, an' it was there he met my sister, who was lady's maid to Mrs. Methuen's cousin. She'd been schoolroom-maid first of all, then when the young ladies grew up, they had her taught dressmaking and hairdressin' and took her everywhere with them. And when Lady Lettice married she took my sister Jane with her, and they travelled a lot, an' in Athens there was a carriage accident and my sister was thrown out and stunned, and this young man was passing and he picked her up, and it seems he fell in love with her there and then, for all her eye was swole up with the bump she got—she was a very-good-looking girl was Jane—anyway, 'e never rested till 'e'd married 'er. He was, I suppose, in a rather better position than she was, though, from bein' with the young ladies so constant, my sister seemed to have caught their pretty ways, and spoke exactly like them. She wasn't a bit like me," said Mrs. Dew simply, "you'd never 'ave thought we was sisters."

"What was Stavrides?" Mr. Wycherly asked.

"A sort of writer, sir, for newspapers. When they got married he came to London, and he was correspondent for some paper, some Grecian paper. It isn't a trade I thinks much on, but he earned good money and he insured his life heavy. And then, just like him it was, he forgot to pay the premium, fell ill and died all of a hurry when Jane-Anne was but four-year-old, and my sister was left without anything at all but some forty pounds they 'ad in the bank."

"Poor thing," said Mr. Wycherly. "What did she do?"

"She did dressmaking, an' she took a lodger. Lady Lettice an' the young ladies 'elped her all they could, and she was doin' pretty well when she took an' died, an' she left Jane-Anne to me. My 'usban' was alive then—not as he was much use, an' I've done my best, but you see, I'm only a servant an' not being out reg'lar makes it harder. Lord Dursley, he got her a nomination for the asylum at Baresgill, but I don't know if she can stop there. It's very cold up there in Northumberland, an' she's got a delicate chest. She've been there fifteen months, but 'as 'ad a lot of illness, an' I don't know if she can keep on. They don't like it, you see, sir, such a lot of illness."

"I understand it is some kind of an orphanage. The boys, you know, spoke to me about your niece, Mrs. Dew. I quite look forward to making her acquaintance. Do they receive any special training where she is?"

"Oh, yes, sir, it's a most superior place where they train them for young servants. They get their education and their clothes and good, thorough training in household duties, and when they're seventeen they put them out in good families that they know about, where they take an interest in the servants and treat them well."

"It sounds an admirable institution," said Mr. Wycherly. "Are the children happy there?"

"Most of the girls, sir, are happy as birds. It's a really good place, sir, plenty of wholesome food, nice airy rooms—but there! Jane-Anne she frets something dreadful. Sometimes I fear she'll never make a good dependable servant. If it's book-learnin', now, she's on to it like a cat on to a mouse. There's never no complaint there—but you never know what flightiness Jane-Anne 'll be after."

"You see," Mr. Wycherly said indulgently, "she is only a child as yet. We must have patience. Anyway, Mrs. Dew, I hope that is settled. Send for your furniture and for Jane-Anne——"

"I am deeply obliged to you, sir," Mrs. Dew said earnestly, "and I will endeavour to serve you faithful. I will arrange with Miss Morecraft, her as I shares the 'ouse with, and I'll fetch Jane-Anne most thankfully when she can be moved——"

"Is she ill then?"

"She's managed to get a most fearful cold on 'er chest; 'ow I can't conceive, but so it is; she's that hoarse and croupy, Miss Morecraft's kep' 'er in bed, and what I really came to ask, sir, was if I might pop round after supper to see 'ow the child is."

"By all means, Mrs. Dew, and whenever she can be moved, bring her here. Then you can look after her yourself."

Mr. Wycherly was very exhausted after this long conversation. He lay back in his chair and closed his eyes with a sense of well-earned repose. Whatever this child—this window-breaking, "cropping-up," generally disturbing little girl might be, she could not be one half so dreadful as the sort of servant Mr. Wycherly saw himself a thrall to if Mrs. Dew deserted him. Besides, Mrs. Dew, herself, would be there to keep her in order.

"These domestic cares are very disorganising," he reflected. He felt a positive distaste for the Migrarian School of Philosophy just then. The pamphlet on Eubulides lay open at his elbow, but he ignored it. Instead, he went over to his book-case and took from it "Tristram Shandy," which he dearly loved. He opened it at random, standing where he was, and his eyes fell on this passage:

"'I can't get out—I can't get out,' said the starling.

"I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. 'I can't get out,' said the starling. 'God help thee!' said I, 'but I'll let thee out, cost what it will.'"

"I wonder now," Mr. Wycherly thought to himself, "if that poor little half-Greek girl feels like Sterne's starling."

CHAPTER VII

JANE-ANNE SWEARS FEALTY

"Minds lead each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless points, and at last greet each other at the journey's end. An old man and a child would talk together; and the old man be led on his path and the child left thinking." JOHN KEATS.

Jane-Anne had managed to get an exceedingly bad cold. To run on wet grass in stockings, if one wears the stockings all the evening afterwards, is not a wise proceeding for a delicate person. And when, the next day, she went to keep her tryst with Edmund, she knew very well that her lung was at its old tricks again; and that, had she been "at the Bainbridge," matron would have sent for the doctor. He would have listened at her back with his funny indiarubber tube, and would then have muttered something mysterious about "crepitation."

Jane-Anne had her own idea of "crepitation," which she abbreviated to "the creppits." She always pictured this unfortunate lung as a bent and aged person sidling along "with legs that went tap-lapperty like men that fear to fall."

It was tiresome that lung; for whenever it began its tap-lapperty entertainment she felt so ill. Her head ached and her legs seemed to weigh tons; her throat was hot and painful, and something seemed to flutter in the palms of her hands like an imprisoned bird.

More dead than alive she crawled back from her meeting with the princess to the stuffy little house "down in St. Clement's" that her aunt shared with Miss Morecraft, knowing full well that bed would be her portion directly anyone noticed how ill she looked.

Miss Morecraft, a dressmaker of severely respectable and melancholy temperament, was not observant, and it happened that just then she was very busy, as her customers were nearly all servants, and a new dress at Whitsuntide is a matter of sacred ritual in that class.

She did, it is true, remark that Jane-Anne was "a dainty feeder" when the child left her dinner almost untasted, but she did not "hold with pampering children," and having eaten her own dinner with considerable relish, went back to her work, having pressed Jane-Anne into the service to do some basting.

It was not till the child nearly fainted during the afternoon that Miss Morecraft awoke to the fact that Jane-Anne was really ill. She was quite kind-hearted, and was rather shocked that she should have made the child sew when she was evidently unfit for any effort of the kind. She put her to bed, made her a cup of tea, and persuaded the milkman to call and tell Mrs. Dew how matters were.

During the evening, Mrs. Dew "popped round," took Jane-Anne's temperature, rubbed her with liniment, scolded her well, kissed her and tucked her up in bed, and left her unaccountably cheered and comforted.

Next morning a strange, new doctor came. He, too, listened at Jane-Anne's back with his funny double telephone. He, too, shook his head and murmured something about crepitation and congestion, just like the doctor at "Bainbridge's."

"Shall I be able to go back to school?" Jane-Anne croaked eagerly. She was hoarse as a raven.

"When does school begin?" asked the doctor.

"It starts on the 5th of May. I have to go up on the 4th. It's such a long way."

"And this is the 29th of April. No, certainly you won't. You won't be fit for school for another fortnight, if then. Are you sorry?"

"No," said Jane-Anne candidly, "I'm not sorry, but Aunt Martha'll be very sorry."

The doctor laughed. "Well, you must do your best to get well, that's all; but it's no use your going anywhere till that lung has ceased crackling."

Miss Morecraft was far too busy to attend to Jane-Anne herself, and Mrs. Dew, recklessly extravagant if there was real cause for anxiety where her sister's child was concerned, sent in a trained nurse.

The nurse did her duty by Jane-Anne, but considered the post rather beneath her dignity, and was not interested in the fidgetty little girl with the large eyes who sent up her temperature in an aggravating way by getting excited over trifles.

One evening, when the temperature was once more normal, Mrs. Dew informed Jane-Anne of her arrangement with Mr. Wycherly.

"Shall we really live there? Will it be our very own home—not shared?" the child demanded with incredulous delight.

"If there's any sharing it's Mr. Wycherly what shares his house with us," said Mrs. Dew. "I'm to have the cottage for myself, and we get the housekeeper's room for a sitting-room."

"And I shall live in the house with those nice boys?" Jane-Anne went on—"right in the same house."

"Yes," Mrs. Dew said; "but you must remember that you belong to the kitchen part and there must be no trespassin'. It would never do for you to be playin' with the young gentlemen like you was one of theirselves. You must understand that from the very first. Not but what they're very kind young gentlemen, and have ast after you over and over again, an' Mr. Wycherly likewise. Master Edmund, he wants to come and see you before he goes back to school."

"Oh, Aunt Martha, do let him. I should love it so. I promise I won't go up, I'll stay normal, I truly will."

"That I don't believe for one minute, Jane-Anne; why, if I was to take your temperature now—only I'm not going to—I know it'd be over a hundred, with you so pink and all. No, I don't hold with Master Edmund coming to see you here. I've never been really wrop up in this place—too many threads and snippets about for my fancy an' a smell like a draper's shop all day long. I've no wish as Master Edmund should see you here—. Now don't you go cryin' out before you're hurt. Wait till I can tell you——"

"Oh, aunt, what—do be quick."

"The doctor says that seein' the weather's so good, you can be moved any time now provided you go straight to bed when you get there——"

"And you're going to move me—oh, Aunt Martha, how lovelly—to-day?"

"No, not to-day, but to-morrow, nurse'll bring you in a fly. And you must promise to keep calm and not go bouncin' and exclaimin' and runnin' up to a hundred over nothing at all."

"Aunt Martha, I'll behave like a stucky-image," Jane-Anne protested.

"You're more like a Jack-in-the-box than any image I've ever come across, but I do think it'll be better for me to have you where I can see to your food my own self. I don't seem to have no faith in that nurse's beef-tea nor 'er arraroot—lumpy stuff what I saw. An' if you're to be got strong enough to go back to the Bainbridge in the next three weeks (I don't know how they 'll take this fresh worriment) you must be fed up. So now you know. You're to get up for your tea and go back to bed directly after, and you're to keep quiet and not get into a fantique nor go makin' a palladum all about nothin'. Do you hear me, Jane-Anne?"

"Yes, Aunt Martha, but I think fantiques and palladums must be lovelly things; they sound so, and I long to make them, only I don't know how."

"It strikes me it's little else you'll ever make. Now lie down in bed for I must run. Most considerate the master's been, letting me come off at all times to see you, and I hope you'll remember it and try and make yourself useful when you get about again. Good-bye, child, and we shan't be separated much longer for which I thank the Lord as made us both."

It marked a change in Mrs. Dew's attitude towards the household in Holywell that she spoke of Mr. Wycherly as "the master." It suggested a permanence in their relations which would have been very reassuring to him had he heard it. Jane-Anne, too, noticed the phrase, and when her aunt was gone gleefully repeated to herself:

"See-saw Margery Daw,

Jenny shall have a new master,

She shall have but a penny a day

Because she can work no faster."

"It's not Jenny really, it's Johnny, but Jenny does as well, and I'll work without the penny," thought Jane-Anne, "if only that beautiful old gentleman will be my master too."

Edmund had elected to take his guardian for a walk before tea, and led him over Magdalen bridge, out into the Cowley Road, and finally into Jeune Street.

"Why are you taking me this way?" Mr. Wycherly asked. "It does not appear to me to be a particularly agreeable neighbourhood."

"It isn't," Edmund frankly agreed, "but now we're here we may as well look in and see Jane-Anne; she's to sit up a bit this afternoon, Mrs. Dew said so, and she said I needn't trouble to go and see her because she's coming to us to-morrow, but I think we ought to go, you know, especially as we're here. You haven't seen her, and she'll like coming better if she's seen you."

"Edmund," said Mr. Wycherly, stopping in the middle of the road, "acknowledge that you have brought me here with the deliberate intention of visiting Mrs. Dew's niece."

"Well, Guardie, I did think of it. Don't you think it's the proper thing to do?"

By this time they had reached the door, whereupon Edmund knocked loudly without waiting for further discussion.

Miss Morecraft was much flustered.

"Yes, they could see the little girl if they didn't mind coming upstairs. She had just been got up and the nurse had gone out for a breath of fresh air. Very warm for the time of year wasn't it."

Miss Morecraft opened the bedroom door, and without any announcement squeezed herself against the outer wall that Mr. Wycherly might enter.

Jane-Anne was seated in an armchair at the window looking frail as a sigh. She wore a bright pink flannelette dressing-gown which accentuated her pallor. She loved this garment dearly, for dressing growns were not included in the uniform of "The Bainbridge." Most of the girls were far too strong and healthy to need them, and Mrs. Dew had made this for Jane-Anne during one of her many illnesses.

Mr. Wycherly stood in the narrow doorway and the afternoon sun shone in on him, on his silvery hair and gentle, high-bred face.

"May we come in, my dear?" he asked. "Do you feel well enough to see us?"

Poor Jane-Anne was too weak to stand up and curtsey. She flushed and paled, and paled and flushed as she turned her thin, sensitive little face towards Mr. Wycherly, but there was no mistaking the welcome in her great eyes, as she whispered: "Please do, sir, I'm so sorry I mayn't get up and put a chair for you."

"I'll get him a chair," said Edmund, pushing in under his guardian's arm, for the door was very narrow. "I thought I'd show him to you before you came to-morrow, then you won't feel strange with any of us."

There wasn't much room in that bedroom. The bed took up most of the floor and there was only one other chair besides Jane-Anne's, so Edmund sat on the end of the bed.

"You must make haste and get strong," Mr. Wycherly said kindly, "and if this fine weather goes on you'll be able to sit in the garden and get plenty of fresh air that way! And when you are able we must see about a little drive. That ought to be good for you."

"Oh!" exclaimed Jane-Anne. "Oh! I don't know how I shall wait till to-morrow, I want to come so much."

"Let's get a cab and take her now," Edmund suggested; "it would be a lark, and such a surprise for Mrs. Dew."

Jane-Anne looked from Edmund to Mr. Wycherly, but saw that the enchanting proposition found no favour in his eyes.

"We mustn't do that," he said, "we haven't got the doctor's permission, and I don't think Mrs. Dew has got her room ready yet."

"This bed's coming for me to-morrow," Jane-Anne said shyly. "The things in this room are Aunt's."

"You won't be such a squash in the room you're going to have," Edmund remarked. "It's not a big room but you'll be able to get round the furniture better."

"It will be so lovelly to have a little room of my own," Jane-Anne said softly.

"I hope you will sleep well in it, and get strong," said Mr. Wycherly. "And I am sure Mrs. Dew will make it as pretty for you as possible. And now, my child, we must go. I don't think you are very fit for visitors as yet, and we mustn't tire you. We just looked in to tell you how welcome you will be to-morrow."

"We've got a bathroom, you know," Edmund said proudly, anxious to do the honours of their house. "Hot and cold and a squirty thing for washing your head, you can use it for the rest of you, too, if you like, but it makes rather a mess. It's in the basin really, and we do each other sometimes. I do like a bathroom, don't you?"

Jane-Anne murmured her appreciation of that luxury, and Mr. Wycherly held out his hand to her, and she gave him hers; such a nervous little hand, so thin and hectic and fluttering: yet it grew still as it lay in his, and there seemed some subtle contact in its gentle clasp.

The child's eyes and the old man's met in a long gaze that asked and promised much.

The eager, hungry little face grew a thought dim to Mr. Wycherly, it was so wistful and so wan. Instead of good-bye, he said, "God bless you, my child, God bless you," and went out of the room rather quickly.

Edmund's farewells were longer, and Mr. Wycherly waited patiently for him in the sunny street. He had gone out so quietly that Miss Morecraft never heard him.

She heard Edmund, though, and hastened to the door to speed the parting guest.

Jane-Anne, faint with rapture, lay crumpled up in her chair.

"He looked at me," she whispered, "he looked at me just like he looked at him that night when I peeped through the window—just every bit as kind.

"See-saw Margery Daw,

Jenny has got a new master."

CHAPTER VIII

JANE-ANNE ASSISTS PROVIDENCE

"To be sick is to enjoy monarchial

Prerogatives." Elia.

The doctor was Mrs. Methuen's doctor, and she had told him something of Mrs. Dew and his little patient; of how that worthy woman had given up place after place in the last five years that she might keep "an 'ome" for her orphaned niece; of how Jane-Anne was born in Athens and brought to London when she was a baby; of the modest, beautiful lady's maid, her mother, and the brilliant irresponsible young journalist, her father, so that he felt a kindly interest in his excitable little patient, and was sympathetically glad that "an 'ome" had been found for aunt and niece that seemed to promise rooted comfort and stability for both of them.

Therefore, when, on the morning fixed for Jane-Anne's removal to Holywell, he came to sanction or forbid that removal, he refrained from taking her temperature and said that the child could go.

Whereupon Jane-Anne's strength was increased tenfold, so that when she was dressed she walked across the room by herself, and sat in a chair by the window while the nurse packed her yellow tin trunk.

Then came the great, the tremendous moment when the fly stood before the door, and the strong young nurse carried her downstairs and placed her in it, with a cushion for her back and a rug sent by Mr. Wycherly over her knees.

The drive passed like a brilliant dream. The men were up and the busy streets were full of bustling life and youthful jollity. Jane-Anne sat forward in her seat, the wavering colour vivid in her cheeks, and even the inverted pie-dish could not wholly shadow the bright gaiety of her eyes. All too soon it was over and they stopped before the archway in Holywell where Mrs. Dew was waiting to help her niece in at the side-door.

It seemed a little hard to be hustled up to her aunt's room and there and then undressed and put to bed—a tame ending to so thrilling an experience; but once between the sheets Jane-Anne discovered that she was unaccountably and extraordinarily tired. She meekly drank the egg beaten up in warm milk that her aunt brought her, lay back on the pillow, and at once fell fast asleep.

Since term began Edmund had been exceedingly busy. Never before had he seen so many young men gathered together.

Hitherto his acquaintance had lain almost exclusively among elderly persons or boys of his own age. To be sure there were two youngish masters at his preparatory school, but the mere fact that they were masters set them on a distant and undesirable plane for Edmund.

But now young men, young men were all around him: in the houses opposite, on the pavements, in the hitherto so stately and silent quadrangles, on the river, in the playing fields.

One night as he lay in bed Edmund had heard a great many cabs plying up and down Holywell, and in the morning this transformation had come to pass. The tide of youthful life flooded every corner. Even the grave grey buildings seemed to open sleepy eyes and laugh and wink at one another in enjoyment of this resistless torrent, and all the inherent sociability in Edmund's nature gushed forth to join and mingle in the jocund stream.

Before three days had passed he had friends in half a dozen colleges. His method of procedure was quite simple. He sallied forth without Montagu, who was shy and exclusive and would have died rather than address a stranger without legitimate cause, and selecting an apparently amiable and manifestly idle youth, asked him the way somewhere in broadest Doric. On two occasions he happened to hit upon a fellow-countryman, and directly he discovered this he spoke in an ordinary way, and they were friends at once. He generally explained exhaustively who he was and whence he came, where he lived and the resources of the establishment in Holywell, and his new-found friends evidently found his conversation amusing, for they neither snubbed nor checked his garrulity.

On the day of Jane-Anne's arrival he had been out all the morning finding his way about Oxford by the means indicated, and only returned just as Mrs. Dew was laying luncheon.

"Is Jane-Anne not coming till afternoon?" he asked.

"Jane-Anne's here, Master Edmund, been here these two hours."

"Here! and we've never been told nor seen her. Where is she?"

"Sound asleep in my bed, she's that weak—but I don't believe moving her's done her a bit of harm, she's sleeping like a baby and looks that contented——"

"Can we go and look at her?" asked Montagu.

"No, sir, please, sir, I'd rather she slep' as long as she can. She's not slep' much this last week an' I shall let her be till she wakes."

"Will you tell us whenever she wakes?" Edmund persisted. "You see, we go back to school in two days now so we shan't see very much of her, 'specially if we don't begin at once."

"You young gentlemen had better keep on with your own doin's and never mind Jane-Anne. She's got to go to school, too—soon as she's well enough," said Mrs. Dew primly. She set the last spoon and fork symmetrically in their places and went back to the kitchen to dish up lunch.

Edmund looked across at Montagu. "I shall stop in this afternoon, and I'm going to see Jane-Anne," he whispered obstinately; "she's in our house."

"So'm I," said Montagu with brief decision.

The bed and "bits of furniture" came from Jeune Street in the afternoon, and the noise of the men carrying things up the uncarpeted stairs woke Jane-Anne, who lay for a minute staring at the unfamiliar room and wondering where she was.

It was a fairly large room with a wide latticed window that overlooked the stone-cutter's yard, for the cottage was to the side of the house and its three windows looked that way. Clean muslin curtains hung at the window, so that Jane-Anne couldn't see out except when they moved with the breeze. The ceiling was low and an oak beam crossed it. Most of the rooms in the main part of the house were panelled, but here they were papered, and the paper was of a cheerful chintzy pattern with garlands of little pink roses.

The furniture was all of brightly polished mahogany that had been in Elsa's room at Remote, and it had that characteristic individual look only to be found in old furniture well tended by careful hands through many years.

The Chippendale Talboys had a scroll top with a pedestal in the centre, and on that pedestal was a little brass owl. The handles had lost their lacquer with time, but the warm red wood was mirror-like in its brightness, and in the great "press"—a cupboard in two divisions with deep sliding shelves—Jane-Anne watched the reflection of the fluttering curtain with sleepy satisfaction.

She had no idea why she liked these things so much better than the painted wood that furnished the bedroom in Jeune Street, but she did like them amazingly, and their presence filled her with such satisfaction as caused her for a little while to forget how exceedingly hungry she was.

Presently the door was opened a little way and a fair curly head was poked through cautiously. Jane-Anne was lying with her back to the door, and all that was visible of her was a night of black hair streaming over the quilt and a long slender mound in the bed where her body lay. She was so still that Edmund thought she was asleep, and was going away again when something, some tiny sound, caused her to turn round, and she saw him.

Edmund vanished like a flash and she heard his stentorian voice proclaiming: "She's awake, Mrs. Dew; you can bring that chicken."

Then he returned, and nodding at her in most friendly fashion seated himself at the end of the bed, remarking:

"What an awful lot of hair you've got; isn't it frightfully hot?"

"I can never keep the ribbons on it in bed. I don't mind it. I rather like to be hot."

The two stared at each other, and Edmund decided that Jane-Anne looked nicer in bed than when she was up. The soft, shadowy masses of her hair were infinitely more becoming than the pie-dish. Her forehead was smooth and placid. There was no deep wrinkle between her black eyebrows.

"I'm glad you're here," said Edmund genially; "but it's a pity you're in bed. You might have done some more fielding if you'd been up."

"I'm very sorry I can't run after balls for you, sir," Jane-Anne said meekly, "but I can't be sorry I'm in bed, for if I wasn't I'd be going back to the Bainbridge almost at once, and now doctor says I can't go for another fortnight."

"And you're glad not to go? Why?"

"Because——" said Jane-Anne; but at this moment Mrs. Dew appeared with a tray. She swept Edmund out of the room, plumped up the invalid's pillows, got her into a bed-jacket, and then stood over her while, with the best will in the world, Jane-Anne did full justice to her dinner.

"What a pretty room this is, Aunt Martha," she said when she had eaten the last spoonful of pudding. "What is it makes it so pretty?"

"The things in it is all good," Mrs. Dew replied, "all old and good; not at all what's suited to a servant's bedroom, if you ask me. But they was here when I came, an', of course, it isn't for me to find fault. The other things has come, and I've got them arranged, but the carpet couldn't be nailed down for fear of waking you. They look very different in a good-sized room to what they did in Jeune Street, I can tell you. I'm very pleased to see my own things what I'm used to. You shall have this room, Jane-Anne, while you're here. I'll move my clothes to-morrow and put yours in. If it isn't Master Edmund again, and Master Montagu with 'im—I never knew such perseverin' young varmints, an' the times I've sent them away. One'd think you was some sort of a exhibition, that one would. Yes, sirs, you may come in, but you mustn't stop long. One'd think as you'd never seen a sick person before, an' me not had time so much as to wash her face before you was back again. What! Mr. Wycherly wants to come and see her after tea? Well, it's a great honour, and very kind on his part after going yesterday and all."

This time the interview was brief and unsatisfactory, for Mrs. Dew remained in the room and Montagu, in consequence, was absolutely dumb, while Jane-Anne was too nervous to do more than mumble negatives or affirmatives to the innumerable questions asked by the quite unembarrassed Edmund.

After five minutes of it the boys departed of their own accord.

Jane-Anne slept again from lunch till tea time, and after tea Mr. Wycherly came to see her.

This time Mrs. Dew did not remain. She set a chair for him and left them. Jane-Anne was sitting up in bed, arrayed in a white dimity jacket of Mrs. Dew's. This garment was voluminous and much too large for its wearer, so that Jane-Anne's face and hair seemed to emerge from amidst a billowy sea of dimity. Her hair was still loose and streamed over the bed. Mrs. Dew had wanted to plait it up, but Jane-Anne said the thick plaits hurt her head when she lay down, so her aunt gave way.

"You are looking better, my child," said Mr. Wycherly.

"I am better, sir; I'm nearly well, I'm afraid."

"Afraid! but surely you want to be well?"

"I should if I was going to stay here," Jane-Anne said earnestly. "Sir, do you think you could stop me going back to the Bainbridge?"

"Stop you," Mr. Wycherly repeated, much perplexed. "But I thought——"

"I'm sure," Jane-Anne interrupted eagerly, "if it's to learn to be a servant that I've got to go back, Aunt could teach me just as well—better, I think. She can do everything they do there, and do it nicer than the people that teaches us. She is a good servant, isn't she, sir?"

"Your aunt is a quite admirable person," Mr. Wycherly said gravely, "and most accomplished in every household art; but from what she told me I gathered that this school is a very good one, and that it was a great help to her to have got you into it."

Jane-Anne's eager face blanched. "Please, sir," she whispered, "if I promise to eat very little and work very hard would you let me stay with you and aunt?" She clasped her hands and leant forward, devouring Mr. Wycherly's face with her great tragic eyes. "Aunt would be very angry if she knew I'd spoken to you; but you could stop me going if you liked, and if I go back, I shall die, I know I shall."

"What is it you dislike so much?" Mr. Wycherly asked.

"All of it, except the lessons, they are lovelly. I can't seem to do it; my back aches so, and it's so cold."

"But it won't be cold this time. Summer is almost here."

"It isn't the weather, it's my heart," cried Jane-Anne; "it's that that's so cold. Nobody cares much about me, they think me odd and funny. Do you think me odd and funny, sir?"

Mr. Wycherly certainly did, but he laid one of his beautiful old hands on Jane-Anne's, saying gently, "I think that as yet you are not very strong, and I am quite sure that it is bad for you to worry about going back. You can't possibly go back for another fortnight, your aunt said so, and—who knows——?"

Mr. Wycherly had not intended to say this last at all. It was most unwise and misleading, but the brown eyes held his and compelled him to give them comfort. He tried to patch up his mistake by saying, in a matter of fact tone: "Suppose Montagu or Edmund begged me not to send him back to school, what should I do? Because, you see, I know that school is the best place for them—though for me the sun sets and never rises till they come back. We all have to do things we don't like."

"But they like school—they told me so."

"You probably would like it, too, if you made up your mind to do so."

"I've tried so hard, sir. I really have. Your young gentlemen don't have to wear horrid clothes at their school; you don't know how dismal it is. I believe if I might live here with you and aunt I'd never have the creppits any more; I'd be so warm and happy in my heart."

"Well, you must keep on being warm and happy, and get strong and merry—and then—we'll see what can be done."

Oh, weak, soft-hearted Mr. Wycherly! Against his will, against his better judgment, the words slipped out.

Jane-Anne, white but radiant, lay back exhausted on her pillows. Mr. Wycherly stood up to go. "Promise me," he said, "that you won't worry, that you will eat and sleep as much as you can, that you will do everything that your good aunt and the doctor bid you, and that you will try to be happy and at home."

Jane-Anne sat forward again. "Mr. Wycherly, sir," she said breathlessly, "you won't forget, you will try and make aunt keep me? Oh, I have cried and cried, and prayed and prayed, and I don't think God can expect much more of a little girl like me, do you?"

"Crying is absolutely forbidden. You must promise me that you won't cry any more."

"I promise," she said meekly, and lay back on her pillows again. "But you, too; you won't forget?"

"I certainly shall not forget. Now I must really go."

He had reached the door, when an imperative cry from the bed stopped him.

"You haven't said it."

"Said what?" and Mr. Wycherly trembled lest she should force him to swear then and there that she should not go back to the Bainbridge.

"What you said yesterday afternoon. Please say it, and then perhaps He will."

"God bless you, my child," Mr. Wycherly mumbled, much embarrassed.

As he made his way through the housekeeper's room to his own part of the house he reflected that Mrs. Dew was certainly right when she described her niece as "making a stir." She had assuredly stirred his heart to a quite painful extent. He was moved and perturbed and puzzled as he had not been for many a long day, and through all his pondering there sounded Sterne's words to the imprisoned starling: "'God help thee—but I'll let thee out, cost what it will.'"

CHAPTER IX

THE QUEST

"My voice shall with thy future visions blend,

And reach into thy heart, when mine is cold,

A token and a tone...." Childe Harold.

Next day Jane-Anne was allowed to sit in the garden under the apple-tree: a queer little hunched-up figure in the tight stuff-dress and a shawl. She also wore the pie-dish, for Mrs. Dew was one of those people who considered it almost disreputable to be out of doors bare-headed.

She sat in a basket-chair and on her knees lay her most recent prize, "Home Influence," a fat handsome volume bound in purple cloth with gilt edges. For lessons, Jane-Anne had won every prize open to her at the asylum. Although she had only been there a year, and that year constantly broken by long bouts of illness, she had gained seven books. These, which included a Bible, a prayer-book, and church hymnal, with one other comprised her whole library. The prizes were all of a moral and edifying character, and Jane-Anne had read them over and over again hungrily, with the passionate interest and enthusiasm which she brought to everything outside her actual daily duties. And although she whole-heartedly admired them she was yet subconsciously critical and unsatisfied. She regarded her prizes with the greatest respect. Familiarity had, so far, bred no contempt for them in her mind, but all the time she felt that there was something lacking. Although they were the only books she possessed, they were not the only ones she had read. In the previous autumn, her mother's mistress, Lady Dursley, had commanded her aunt to take the child for a change to their place in Gloucestershire, accompanying the order with a liberal cheque for travelling expenses. The family was in Scotland and most of the big house shut up, and nearly all the servants were making holiday, except the housekeeper, an old friend of Mrs. Dew, and one elderly kitchen-maid. But the great library was open, for a young man had been sent down to catalogue the books. He was an intelligent young man and took a fancy to Jane-Anne and had her with him a great deal. He found her books he thought good for her, and on departure presented her with the little green-covered "Children's Treasury," compiled by Palgrave.

In this Jane-Anne read constantly and carefully, not because she was particularly attracted by the poems, though some of them she loved and learned by heart, but because whenever she came across any poetry she searched through it eagerly in the hope of finding a poem her father used to repeat to her. She had read and re-read the little green book unceasingly, but nowhere could she find her poem.

Her father died before she was five years old, but Jane-Anne's recollection of him was curiously vivid, and at this very moment her mind strove to materialise a memory elusive in some ways as a puff of smoke, sharp and defined in others as a tongue of leaping flame against a midnight sky.

The moment Mrs. Dew had safely disappeared into the house the child dragged off the pie-dish and cast it violently on the grass at her feet. Then she lay back in her chair, her eyes dreamy and pensive, though ever and again she knit her black eyebrows in her effort to remember.

Her thin hands lay folded above the unopened volume on her knees and she sat very still.

It was warm and pleasant in Mr. Wycherly's garden; a thrush sang in the boughs above her head, and every now and then pink and white petals dropped softly upon her hair. A flutter of wind blew over a great clump of narcissus bearing their perfume on its wings, and the heavy scent was memory-laden for Jane-Anne.

She saw a long, low-ceiled, lamp-lit room with a window at either end and all the furniture ranged round the walls that a free path might be open for the restless pacing up and down of one who was never too busy or too absorbed to be at the beck and call of an often fretful little girl. As in a vision she beheld that man "with all his keen worn look and Grecian grace" tramping to and fro and holding in his arms a tired, fidgetty child who could not sleep.

Backwards and forwards he went, and with the soothing movement was the sound of words sorrowful and majestic, musical in their rhythmic swing and balance: words that poor Jane-Anne could never remember though she felt that they were written indelibly on mind and heart but covered, covered deeply with layer upon layer of fugitive things of little worth. Some day, she was convinced, she would find that poetry and with it a thousand things about her father that she had forgotten. He often wore a narcissus in his button-hole, and as her head lay on his shoulder the crushed flower gave forth a double fragrance.

It was this familiar scent, strong in the warm old Oxford garden, that seemed to compass her about in an atmosphere of memories, memories of a time when she, too, was always warm, cared about, schemed for, enwheel'd around with love on every hand.

The lines between the black eyebrows were smoothed out as by a tender hand. The unremembered poem ceased to worry her. She would find it some day. Meanwhile, she was sure her daddy knew she loved him. There was something he had told her to remember and she had forgotten, but only for a little while. It would come back, she was sure it would come back. Here, in this house, where there were so many books, perhaps she would find it.

She saw again her beautiful, gentle mother, so calm always and patient. Mrs. Dew was careful to impress upon Jane-Anne that she in no way resembled her mother, and the child never resented this reproach, for had not that very mother rejoiced in her likeness to her father? "My little Maid of Athens," had been her mother's name for Jane-Anne, and Jane-Anne treasured it in her mind. She knew that her worthy aunt had never either liked or approved of her father, and this only made her more passionately loyal to his memory. She pondered these things in her heart, puzzled and pained sometimes, but never daunted in her pride. It was from no mean country that her father had come, she was sure of that. She knew little enough of Greece, nothing of its great history, but chance phrases that she had heard in infancy remained in her mind. She was sure that there was something to know, something worth knowing, and that she would know it some day.

She never spoke of her parents to her companions at the asylum; and although Mrs. Dew would often talk fondly and proudly of her mother and Jane-Anne loved her for it, her aunt's silence with regard to the father she adored filled the child with a resentment none the less bitter that it never found expression. Jane-Anne was perfectly aware of her hostile attitude, although Mrs. Dew was careful never to say one word in disparagement of a man she had been quite unable to understand; whom she had heartily disliked.

"I wonder why I'm thinking so much of my daddie since I came here?" Jane-Anne thought to herself. "I suppose it's because I'm happier."

Presently, over the grass towards her came Montagu, very long in the leg and short in the sleeve. Edmund was out zestfully finding his way about Oxford in his recently discovered fashion.

Montagu sat down on the grass at Jane-Anne's feet and looked up at her, smiling broadly, but never a word said he till he espied the book in her lap.

"What's that?" he asked.

"One of my prizes, sir," Jane-Anne answered primly.

"Is it decent?"

"It's most interesting."

"Can I look at it?"

The book changed hands and Montagu began to read. He turned the pages very fast, to the wonderment of Jane-Anne, who had never seen people read after this fashion.

He was lying face-downwards on the grass in front of her, and she watched his eyes as they swept the page from top to bottom in, apparently, one glance. She liked his thin brown face with the large kind eyes and firm capable mouth that was always shut when he wasn't talking, but just at that moment she thought that his expression was less pleasant than usual, that there was something scornful and almost sinister about his mouth, and yet she was sure that in some queer way he was amused. Why?

Jane-Anne had never found anything in the least amusing in the work in question; interesting, certainly; "touching" (the lady who gave them Sunday lessons at the asylum was fond of the word "touching") frequently; but humorous never. The authorities who chose books for female orphans at the Bainbridge did not consider the cultivation of a sense of humour in any way a necessary part of the training.

Presently Montagu began to dip into the book here and there, still reading with that lightning-like rapidity that so astonished Jane-Anne.

In five minutes he shut it with a slam and looked up at her and laughed.

"What awful rot," he remarked genially, as though certain of sympathy.

Jane-Anne gazed at him in consternation. "Rot?" she faltered.

"Fearful squish; you don't mean to say you really like it?"

"I don't know what you mean," she said, so offended that she quite forgot the respectful "sir."

"It's so stilted and bombastic and unnatural. The style"—here Montagu unconsciously gave a perfect imitation of his house master's manner—"is so cheap and meretricious."

"I don't understand about style in books," said Jane-Anne, still much umbraged. "D'you mean the binding?"

"Good gracious, no. I mean the way it's written. Listen to this"—and Montagu opened the book haphazard and read the following extract aloud:—"'He had been minister of a favourite church in one of the southern towns, and master of an establishment for youths of high rank, in both which capacities he had given universal satisfaction. The reprehensible conduct of some of his pupils, carried on at first so secretly as to elude his knowledge, at length became so notorious as to demand examination. He had at first refused all credence, but when proved by the confused replies of all, and half-confession of some, he briefly and emphatically laid before them the enormity of their conduct, and declared, that as confidence was entirely broken between them, he would resign the honour of their education, refusing to admit them any longer as members of his establishment.' There!" Montagu exclaimed, "could you have anything worse?"

"I think it's all said very properly and grandly," Jane-Anne protested. "I don't see what's the matter with it at all."

Montagu rolled over on the grass and sat up. "It's the grandness that's so detestable."

"It's my best prize," she said indignantly.

"I'm sorry," said Montagu, seeing that she was really hurt, "but you ask Guardie about that sort of writing."

"It's printed," snapped Jane-Anne.

Montagu gazed at her in hopeless bewilderment. He had never before argued with a girl.

Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes filled with angry tears. She clenched her thin little hands and bit her lips to keep from bursting into sobs.

"I say," Montagu exclaimed, with real contrition, "why do you mind? What does it matter what I think?"

"If you," Jane-Anne gasped, "had as few books as me, and loved them every one dearly, and then someone came along and abused them and called them 'rot' and 'merry something' and 'squish,' you wouldn't like it."

This time the big tears escaped, rolled over and down her cheeks, dropping with a splash on to the plaid shawl covering her knees.

And at this critical moment Mr. Wycherly came out of the house and across the grass towards them. He had seen the children from his study window, and remembering that the boys went back to school next day, decided to seek their society under the pleasant shade of the apple-tree.

Montagu stalked over to the tool house to fetch a chair for his guardian and arrived with it as Mr. Wycherly reached the apple-tree. Jane-Anne had lost her handkerchief, the tears were shining on her cheeks, and she gave a most unmistakable sniff just as Mr. Wycherly reached them. But she stood up and curtsied with downcast eyes and burning cheeks, and at the same moment Montagu came back bearing a chair for his guardian.

"What is the matter?" asked Mr. Wycherly.

Jane-Anne continued to stand, and lifted her tear-washed eyes to his face. Had it been stern or severe she could never have answered a word; as it was, she said quite simply: "He didn't like my prize and I minded."

Mr. Wycherly sat down in the chair Montagu had brought and looked from the pained and indignant Jane-Anne to the evidently puzzled and distressed Montagu.

"Suppose we all sit down and try to come to a better understanding," he said.

Jane-Anne sank heavily into her chair. She was still weak, and even the little effort to greet Mr. Wycherly with due respect caused her legs to quake and her heart to beat thunderously in her ears.

She leant her head against the back of the chair and looked so white that for a moment Mr. Wycherly thought she was about to faint. But she did nothing of the kind.

Instead, she said in a voice that wholly belied her exhausted appearance: "Have you read 'Home Influence,' sir?"

"I don't think so," said Mr. Wycherly; "is that the name of the book under discussion?"

Jane-Anne held it out towards him; he took it from her carefully, placed his eye-glasses on his nose, opened it haphazard, and began to read.

Precisely the same thing happened as with Montagu. His eyes sought a page and he turned it. This extraordinary way of reading was not peculiar to Montagu, that was evident. But in Mr. Wycherly's face neither scorn nor amusement was portrayed, only a polite interest.

In three minutes Montagu said, "Well?"

Mr. Wycherly closed the book. "I cannot," he said, "be expected to express an opinion after so cursory a glance at the contents. Montagu, go and ask Mrs. Dew for a glass of milk; this child looks faint; bring some biscuits, too."

Montagu sped away, and he turned to Jane-Anne.

"You mustn't mind him," he said kindly. "Clever Winchester boys are always intolerant—while they are boys. Montagu reads a great deal more than he can digest, and people with indigestion are proverbially cantankerous."

Jane-Anne didn't understand what he meant in the very least, but she felt immediately and immensely comforted. So much so, that she was impelled to speak to Mr. Wycherly of her thoughts when she first came out.

"Please, sir," she said, calmly dismissing the merits or demerits of "Home Influence" that seemed so vital a moment ago. "Do you know a piece of poetry about mountains?"

"A great deal of poetry has been written about mountains," Mr. Wycherly replied cautiously.

"It's a piece of poetry I want to find," said Jane-Anne, "that I heard many times long ago, and I can't remember anything about it except that there was mountains. I thought perhaps you'd know it."

Here Montagu appeared with a glass of milk and some biscuits. The milk had slopped over on to the biscuits "in some unaccountable way," he explained; but their sopped condition did not spoil them for Jane-Anne, who munched quite happily and smiled her broad ecstatic smile at him to show that she had forgiven his cruel remarks about "Home Influence."

Presently the doctor came to see her, and Mrs. Dew fetched her in to be sounded.

The moment she had gone Montagu turned upon his guardian, demanding sternly: "Well, isn't it hopeless squish?"

"It is her prize," said Mr. Wycherly gently.

"Why, that's just what she said," Montagu exclaimed in astonishment at his usually logical guardian taking this line.

"You will find," said Mr. Wycherly, "as you go through life that it is never safe to abuse things violently before you have realised your hearer's point of view. You may offend deeply."

"You'd have to be jolly dishonest to always think of that," Montagu answered indignantly.

"You will be jolly rude and disagreeable if you never think of it," Mr. Wycherly retorted. "Besides, did she ask you for your opinion?"

"Well, no—but it seemed such a pity to go on liking such stuff. People must begin to learn what's good and what's bad sometime—and I shouldn't think she's stupid."

"I am quite sure she is not stupid, and I am equally sure that she is painfully sensitive and that you were more than a little stupid not to see it."

"Me, stupid!" Montagu repeated in surprise. "No one has ever called me that before."

Mr. Wycherly chuckled. "I thought," said he, "that the presence of a young girl among us would be mentally stimulating. She has not been in the house two days and yet, you see, already she has suggested to you new possibilities in yourself. By the way—just make a note of any poems you can think of bearing on mountains."