to hear. It was enough for
me to find myself once more safe between the hedges and going as hard as
my feet could carry me in the direction of the gate of Marnhoul.

No sooner was I in the kitchen with the stone floor and the freshly
scoured tin and pewter vessels glinting down from the dresser, than I
heard the voice of Miss Irma asking to be informed if I had come. To
Agnes Anne she called me "your big brother," and I hardly ever remember
being so proud of anything as of that adjective.

Then after my sister had answered, Miss Irma came down the stairs with
her quick light step, not like any I had ever heard. With a trip and a
rustle she came bursting in upon us, so that all suddenly the quaint old
kitchen, with its shining utensils catching the red sunshine through the
low western window and the swaying ivy leaves dappling the floor of
bluish-grey, was glorified by her presence.

She was younger in years than myself, but something of race, of
refinement, of experience, some flavour of an adventurous past and of
strange things seen and known, made her appear half-a-dozen years the
senior of a country boy like me.

"Has he come?" she asked, before ever she came into the kitchen; "is he
afraid?"

"Only of being in a house alone with two girls," said Agnes Anne, "but I
am most afraid of father's blunderbuss which he has brought with him."

"Nonsense," said Miss Irma, determination marked in every line of her
face. "We have a well-armed man on the premises. It is a house fit to
stand a siege. Why, I turned away three score of them with a darning
needle."

"Not but what it is far more serious this time!" she said, a little
sadly. By this time I was reassembling the scattered pieces of "King
George's" armament, while Agnes Anne, in terror of her life, was
searching on the floor and along the passages for things she had not
lost.

As soon as I had got over my first awe of Miss Irma, I asked her
point-blank what was the danger, so that I might know what dispositions
to take.

I had seen the phrase in an old book, thin and tall, which my father
possessed, called _Monro's Expedition_. But Irma bade me help to make
the ground floor of the mansion as strong as possible, and then come
up-stairs to the parlour, where she would tell me "all that it was
necessary for me to know."

I wished she had said "everything"--for, though not curious by nature, I
should have been happy to be confided in by Miss Irma. To my delight,