authors the quiet place, with its
miles of moorland lying inland from the cliffs, was a ripe field for
literary work. Novelists worked out their plots undisturbed by the
hooting of motor horns or the whizzing of tram-cars; scientific men, who
had spent years of study over the treasures of the British Museum or
Kew, came there to sort out their materials for books of reference, and
to have leisure for making certain experiments; writers of travels
reviewed their notes, and archaeologists scheduled the antiquities of
the neighbourhood. To this literary and artistic brotherhood
Porthkeverne offered the calm of the country combined with the mental
stimulus of intellectual comradeship, and though, in the inevitable
march of events, its individual members often changed, the colony
remained and flourished, and sent forth work of a character that was of
value to the world of art and letters.

Miss Kingsley and her sister, Miss Janet, themselves women of strong
literary tastes, had come to the town with the rising tide of the Arts
Settlement, and had established their school chiefly to meet the needs
of the new colony. Most of their pupils were the children of painters
and authors, though a few of the gentry and professional men of the
district also took advantage of such a good local opportunity to educate
their daughters. The Gables was a pleasant old-fashioned white house,
standing on a narrow terrace of the cliff, with a high rock behind to
screen it from the wind, and a view of grey roof-tops leading down to a
peep of the harbour. In the sheltered garden grew, according to their
season, white arum lilies and rosy tamarisk, aloes and myrtle and
oleander and other beautiful half-tropical shrubs, while geraniums,
carnations and humbler flowers bloomed in profusion. There was a veranda
covered with a wistaria, and most of the class-room windows were framed
with sweet-smelling creepers. Long afterwards, when the pupils looked
back to their time at The Gables, they would always connect certain
lessons with the strong scent of honeysuckle, or the faint odour of tea
roses, for the flowers seemed just as much a part of the general culture
of the school as were the Botticelli pictures on the library walls, or
the weekly recitals of modern music.

This garden, Miss Kingsley's fetish and the joy of Miss Janet's heart,
was blooming its best on the particular September afternoon when the
autumn term began. Soon after two o'clock its gre