d as well as I can about grandmamma and
myself, and how and why we came to live in the funny little gray stone
cottage perched up among the Middlemoor Hills, I will go on with what I
can remember myself; for up till now, you see, all I have written has
been what was told to me by other people, especially of course by
granny.

CHAPTER II

AT THE FOOT OF THE LADDER

No, perhaps I was rather hasty in saying I could now go straight on
about what I remember myself. There are still a few things belonging to
the time before I can remember, which I had better explain now, to keep
it all in order.

I have spoken of grandmamma as being alone in the world, and so she
was--as far as having no one _very_ near her--no other children, and not
any brothers or sisters of her own. And on my mother's side I had no
relations worth counting. Mamma was an only child, and her father had
married again after _her_ mother died, and then, some years after, he
died himself, and mamma's half-brothers and sisters had never even seen
her, as they were out in India. So none of her relations have anything
to do with my story or with _me_.

But grandmamma had one nephew whom she had been very fond of when he
was a boy, and whom she had seen a good deal of, as he and papa were at
school together. His name was not the same as ours, for he was the son
of a sister of grandpapa's, not of a brother. It was Vandeleur, Mr.
Cosmo Vandeleur.

He was abroad when our great troubles came--I forget where, for though
he was not a soldier, he moved about the world a good deal to all sorts
of out-of-the-way places, and very often for months and months together,
grandmamma never heard anything about him. And one of the things that
made her still lonelier and sadder when we first came to Windy Gap was
that he had never answered her letters, or written to her for a very
long time.

She thought it was impossible that he had not got her letters, and
almost more impossible that he had not seen poor papa's death in some of
the newspapers.

And as it happened he had seen it and he had written to her once,
anyway, though she never got the letter. He had troubles of his own that
he did not say very much about, for he had married a good while ago, and
though his wife was very nice, she was very, _very_ delicate.

Still, his name was familiar to me. I can always remember hearing
grandmamma talk of 'Cosmo,' and when she told me little anecdotes of
papa as a boy,