ife
and his two children had died of small-pox in Holland, and he didn't marry
again until he was sixty. He had only one child afterwards; that was my
grandmother. But I can't tell you the story properly. You must get my
mother to do that. She makes such a lovely romance out of it. And it _is_
rather romantic, too, isn't it? I like to feel that I've got that behind
me rather than all the stodgy old ancestors the Jervaises have got.
Wouldn't you?"

"Rather," I agreed warmly.

"If I didn't miss all the important points you'd think so," Anne replied
with a little childish pucker of perplexity coming in her forehead. "But
story-telling isn't a bit in my line. I wish it were. I can listen to
mother for hours, and I can never make out quite what it is she does to
make her stories so interesting. Of course she generally tells them in
French, which helps, but I'm no better in French than in English. Mother
has a way of saying 'Enfin' or 'En effet' that in itself is quite
thrilling."

"You don't know quite how well you do it yourself," I said.

She shook her head. "Not like mother," she asserted. With that childish
pucker still wrinkling her forehead she looked like a little girl of
fourteen. I could see her gazing up at her mother with some little halting
perplexed question. I felt as if she were giving me some almost miraculous
confidence, obliterating all the strangeness of new acquaintanceship by
displaying the story of her girlhood.

"She puts mystery into it, too," she went on, still intent on the
difference between her own and her mother's methods. "And, I think, there
really is some mystery that she's never told us," she added as an
afterthought. "After my grandfather died, her mother married again, a
widower with one little girl, and when she grew up mother got her over
here as a sort of finishing governess to Olive Jervaise. She came a year
or two before Brenda was born. She was born in Italy. Did you know that? I
always wonder whether that's why she's so absolutely different from all
the others."

"She certainly is. I don't know whether that's enough to explain it," I
commented. "And did your mother's step-sister go abroad with them?"

"I believe so. She never came back here afterwards. She has been dead for
ages, now. But mother's always rather mysterious about her. That's how I
began, wasn't it? I know that she was very beautiful, and sometimes I
think I can just remember her. I must have been about four whe