e Hillview with a
breakneck stair and poky little rooms, I found a real old cottage. The
room I was taken into was about the nicest I ever saw. I think it would
have fulfilled all your conditions as to the proper furnishing of a
room; indeed, now that I think of it, it was quite a man's room.

"It had a polished floor and some good rugs, and creamy yellow walls
with delicious coloured prints. There were no ornaments except some fine
old brass: solid chairs and a low, wide-seated sofa, and books
everywhere.

"The shape of the room is delightfully unusual. It is long and rather
low-ceilinged, and one end comes almost to a point like the bow of a
ship. There is a window with a window-seat in the bow, and as the house
stands high on a slope and faces west, you look straight across the
river to the hills, and almost have the feeling that you are sailing
into the sunset.

"In this room a girl sat, darning stockings and crying quietly to
herself--crying because her brother David had gone to Oxford the day
before, and she was afraid he would find it hard work to live on his
scholarship with the small help she could give him, afraid that he might
find himself shabby and feel it bitter, afraid that he might not come
back to her the kind, clear-eyed boy he had gone away.

"She told me all about it as simply as a child. Didn't seem to find it
in the least odd to confide in a stranger, didn't seem at all impressed
by the sudden appearance of my fashionably dressed self!

"People, I am often told, find themselves rather in awe of me. I know
that they would rather have me for a friend than an enemy. You see, I
can think of such extraordinarily nasty things to say about people I
don't like. But this little girl treated me as if I had been an older
sister or a kind big brother, and--well, I found it rather touching.

"Jean Jardine is her funny little name. She looks a mere child, but she
tells me she is twenty-three and she has been head of the house since
she was nineteen.

"It is really the strangest story. The father, one Francis Jardine, was
in the Indian Civil Service--pretty good at his job, I gather--and these
three children, Jean and her two brothers, David and Jock, were brought
up in this cottage--The Rigs it is called--by an old aunt of the
father's, Great-aunt Alison. The mother died when Jock was a baby, and
after some years the father married again, suddenly and
unpremeditatedly, a beautiful and almost friendless g