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by

Mrs. Molesworth

_Part 1_

HELENA FRERE and her two younger brothers, Willie and Leigh, were on the
whole very good children. They were obedient and affectionate and very
truthful. Perhaps it was not very difficult for them to be good, for
they had a happy home, wise and kind parents, and a quiet regular life.
None of them had ever been at school, for Mrs. Frere liked home teaching
best for girls, and the little boys were as yet too young for anything
else. Willie was only seven and a half, and Leigh six. Helena was nearly
ten.

They lived in the country--quite in the country, and a rather lonely
part too. So they had almost no companions of their own age, and the few
there were within reach they seldom saw. One family in the
neighbourhood, where there were children, always spent seven months
abroad; another home was saddened by the only son being a cripple and
unable to walk or play; and the boys and girls of a third family were
rather too old to be playfellows with our little people.

"It really seems," said Helena sometimes, "it really seems as if I was
never to have a proper friend of my own. It's much worse for me than for
Willie and Leigh, for they've got each other," which was certainly true.

Still, she was not at all an unhappy little girl, though she was very
sorry for herself sometimes, and did not always quite agree with her
Mother when she told her that it was better to have no companions than
any whom she could not thoroughly like.

"I don't know that, Mamma," Helena would reply. "It would be nice to
have other little girls to play with, even if they weren't quite
perfection."

You can easily believe therefore that there was great excitement and
delight when these children heard, one day, that a new family was coming
to live in the very next house to theirs--only about half a mile off, by
a short cut across the Park--and that in this family there were
children! There were four--Nurse said three, and old Mrs. Betty at the
lodge, who was Nurse's aunt, and rather a gossip, said four. But both
were sure of one thing--that the newcomers--the children of the family,
that is to say--were just about the right ages for "our young lady and
gentlemen."

And before long, Helena and her brothers were able to tell Nurse and
Mrs. Betty more than they had told them. For Mrs. Frere called at
Hailing Wood, which was the name of the neighbouring house, and a few
days afterwards, Mrs. Kingl