day they seemed to hold some sunshine) hung with coloured prints in old rosewood frames—"Saturday Morning," engraved (with many flourishes) by T. Burke, engraver to His Serene Highness the Reigning Landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt; "The Cut Finger," by David Wilkie—those and many others. The furniture was old and good, well kept and well polished, so that the shabby, friendly room had that comfortable air of well-being that only careful housekeeping can give. Books were everywhere: a few precious ones behind glass doors, hundreds in low bookcases round the room.
"I needn't ask you if you are fond of reading," Pamela said.
"Much too fond," Jean confessed. "I'm a 'rake at reading.'"
"You know the people," said Pamela, "who say, 'Of course I love reading, but I've no time, alas!' as if everyone who loves reading doesn't make time."
As they talked, Pamela realised that this girl who lived year in and year out in a small country town was in no way provincial, for all her life she had been free of the company of the immortals. The Elizabethans she knew by heart, poetry was as daily bread. Rosalind in Arden, Viola in Illyria, were as real to her as Bella Bathgate next door. She had taken to herself as friends (being herself all the daughters of her father's house) Maggie Tulliver, Ethel Newcome, Beatrix Esmond, Clara Middleton, Elizabeth Bennet——
The sound of the gong startled Pamela to her feet.
"You don't mean to say it's luncheon time already? I've taken up your whole morning."
"It has been perfectly delightful," Jean assured her. "Do stay a long time at Hillview and come in every day. Don't let Bella Bathgate frighten you away. She isn't used to letting her rooms, and her manners are bad, and her long upper lip very quelling; but she's really the kindest soul on earth. … Would you come in to tea this afternoon? Mrs. M'Cosh—that's our retainer—bakes rather good scones. I would ask you to stay to luncheon, but I'm afraid there mightn't be enough to go round."
Pamela gratefully accepted the invitation to tea, and said as to luncheon she was sure Miss Bathgate would be awaiting her with a large dish of stewed steak and carrots saved from the night before—so she departed.
* * * * *
Later in the day, as Miss Bathgate sat for ten minutes in Mrs. M'Cosh's shining kitchen and drank a dish of tea, she gave her opinion of the lodger.
"Awfu' English an' wi' a' the queer daft ways o' gentry. 'Oh, Miss Bathgate,' a' the time. They tell me Miss Reston's considered a beauty in London. It's no' ma idea o' beauty—a terrible lang neck an' a wee shilpit bit face, an' sic a height! I'm fair feared for ma gasaliers. An' forty if she's a day. But verra pleasant, ye ken. I aye think there maun be something wrang wi' folk that's as pleasant as a' that—owre sweet to be wholesome, like a frostit tattie! … The maid's ca'ed Miss Mawson. She speaks even on. The wumman's a fair clatter-vengeance, an' I dinna ken the one-hauf she says. I think the puir thing's defeecient!"
CHAPTER IV
" … Ruth, all heart and tenderness
Who wept, like Chaucer's Prioress,
When Dash was smitten:
Who blushed before the mildest men,
Yet waxed a very Corday when
You teased the kitten."
AUSTIN DOBSON.
Before seeking her stony couch at the end of her first day at Priorsford, Pamela finished the letter begun in the morning to her brother.
* * * * *
" … I began this letter in the morning and now it is bedtime. Robinson Crusoe is no longer solitary: the island is inhabited. My first visitors arrived about 11 a.m.—a small boy and a dog—an extremely good-looking little boy and a well-bred fox-terrier. They sat on the garden wall until I invited them in, when they ate chocolates and biscuits, and the boy offered to repeat poetry. I expected 'Casabianca' or the modern equivalent, but instead I got the song from Hippolytus, 'O take me to the Mountains, O.' It was rather surprising, but when he invited me to go with him to his home, which is next door, it was more surprising still. Instead of finding another small villa like Hillview with a breakneck stair and poky little rooms, I found a real old cottage. The room I was taken into was about the nicest I ever saw. I think it would have fulfilled all your conditions as to the proper furnishing of a room; indeed, now that I think of it, it was quite a man's room.
"It had a polished floor and some good rugs, and creamy yellow walls with delicious coloured prints. There were no ornaments except some fine old brass: solid chairs and a low, wide-seated sofa, and books everywhere.
"The shape of the room is delightfully unusual. It is long and rather low-ceilinged, and one end comes almost to a point like the bow of a ship. There is a window with a window-seat in the bow, and as the house stands high on a slope and faces west, you look straight across the river to the hills, and almost have the feeling that you are sailing into the sunset.
"In this room a girl sat, darning stockings and crying quietly to herself—crying because her brother David had gone to Oxford the day before, and she was afraid he would find it hard work to live on his scholarship with the small help she could give him, afraid that he might find himself shabby and feel it bitter, afraid that he might not come back to her the kind, clear-eyed boy he had gone away.
"She told me all about it as simply as a child. Didn't seem to find it in the least odd to confide in a stranger, didn't seem at all impressed by the sudden appearance of my fashionably dressed self!
"People, I am often told, find themselves rather in awe of me. I know that they would rather have me for a friend than an enemy. You see, I can think of such extraordinarily nasty things to say about people I don't like. But this little girl treated me as if I had been an older sister or a kind big brother, and—well, I found it rather touching.
"Jean Jardine is her funny little name. She looks a mere child, but she tells me she is twenty-three and she has been head of the house since she was nineteen.
"It is really the strangest story. The father, one Francis Jardine, was in the Indian Civil Service—pretty good at his job, I gather—and these three children, Jean and her two brothers, David and Jock, were brought up in this cottage—The Rigs it is called—by an old aunt of the father's, Great-aunt Alison. The mother died when Jock was a baby, and after some years the father married again, suddenly and unpremeditatedly, a beautiful and almost friendless girl whom he met in London when home on leave. Jean offered no comment on the wisdom or the unwisdom of the match, but she told me the young Mrs. Jardine had sent for her (Jean was then a schoolgirl of fourteen) and had given her a good time in London before she sailed with her husband for India. Rather unusual when you come to think of it! It isn't every young wife who has thought on the honeymoon for schoolgirl stepdaughters, and Jean had seen that it was kind and unselfish, and was grateful. The Jardines sailed for India, and were hardly landed when Mr. Jardine died of cholera. The young widow stayed on—I suppose she liked the life and had little to bring her back to England—and when the first year of her widowhood was over she married a young soldier, Gervase Taunton. I'm almost sure I remember meeting him about—good-looking, perfect dancer, crack polo player. They seem, in spite of lack of money, to have been supremely happy for about three years, when young Taunton was killed playing polo. The poor girl broke her
