school-room, and the
pretty little parlour fitted with French windows, that it might open to
the garden full of rose-bushes and standard apple-trees, and with its
red brick walls covered with plums and jessamine. She began with nine
young girls whom she brought with her as boarders, and five more soon
came, so that she had fourteen in the house, and three more little ones
as day-boarders (two Selways and one Jorring), and eight of us seniors,
who went for lessons from ten to one, an hour for lunch, and then home
at four to late dinner.

It was of course a good thing for Miss Grantley that she had her own old
nurse there for cook and housekeeper, with a strong girl to do the
housework, and a woman from one of the cottages at Vale Farm to help
twice a week. The solicitor's villa had a large garden, and the gardener
and his wife lived in the cottage which had once belonged to the
maltster's foreman at the end of the orchard and close to the old kiln,
so they were always ready to help too; and our governess had very little
to pay for gardening except a few shillings for a labourer now and
then. You may very well believe, then, that Lindley House School was a
very pleasant place. Miss Grantley called it Lindley House because, she
said, old-fashioned people always connected the idea of education with
Lindley Murray's Grammar--not that she taught grammar from Lindley
Murray's book, for she declared the way of teaching was quite different
now, and that there were a good many queer rules in the old grammar
which could only be accounted for by the fact that the old gentleman who
wrote it lived for many years chiefly on boiled mutton and turnips!

When Miss Grantley said things of this kind Mrs. Parmigan used to cry
out, "My dear--pray, now--_do_ consider." And Miss Grantley used to
smile at her, and then the old lady would laugh till she shook the room.
That was the way with our governess; she seemed able to make some people
laugh by only smiling at them; and she could make people cry too by
looking at them with quite a different sort of grave smile and the
strange light in her earnest gray eyes.

Oh!--I have forgotten about Mrs. Parmigan! She was a dear old thing; had
actually been nursery governess to Miss Grantley; and, having married
and been left a widow, had heard of her former pupil and young mistress
being left fatherless and motherless, and now brought her small annuity
to Barton Vale, and helped to teach in the school