table garment for everyday use. Her sisters, Camilla and
Sidonia, sat looking listlessly at nothing, or engaging in purposeless
infantile controversies with one another. Jeremy at one end of the
circle sat strumming fitfully upon his latest instrument, violin or
Jew's harp, his half-savage music breaking in upon Honorine's ceaseless
chatter without prelude or apology. But these interruptions did not in
the least put out his sister. She was proud of some remnants of a
former short-lived beauty, and loved to recount and magnify the ancient
flames she had kindled when "head of a department," dictating the
fashions to the good ladies of Thorsby at Hood and Truslove's long
extinct but once celebrated emporium in the High Street there.

It did not occur to me till afterwards that I ought to have been
frightened--thus sequestered from the world, and my life hardly worth
five minutes' purchase, if I should chance to incur the anger of one of
those mad creatures. But at the time I sat with my French grammar on
my knees, thinking chiefly how funny it was to see the five of us all
seated with the soles of our feet turned to a blank wall. This we did
for the warmth of the dividing wall. And indeed it was never cold--for
before my side had time to cool, Jeremy was firing up his oven again
for the next batch of bread to feed the Deep Moat Grangers and their
guests.

That these could be dangerous thieves and murderers, in spite of the
gossip I had heard, never crossed my mind. They were to me, as I think
to Mr. Ablethorpe, just so many poor things who had lost their senses.
I noticed, however, that all except Jeremy were accustomed to hush
their voices when they spoke of their terrible sister Aphra. And
little by little I was able to draw from Honorine (who, above all
things, loved to talk) the sad history of their wanderings. I will not
attempt to reproduce in detail all her babblings. Indeed, she never
quite finished a sentence. Nor did she ever continue where she left
off. But, so far as I understood her relation, controlled as it was
continually by the denials of Sidonia and Camilla, and punctuated by
the scornful strains of Mad Jeremy, the story of the Orrin family
amounted to this--

Their father had been a teacher in a large Lanarkshire village; but
some money having come into his hands by the death of a distant
relative, he went to Lancashire and there started a mill. He left a
fortune to his children, valued