In 1905, Jan and Fay had been to a party at Ribston Hall: tea in the garden followed by a pastoral play. Anthony was sitting in the balcony, smoking, when the girls came back. He saw their hansom and ran downstairs to meet them, as he always did. They were a family who went in for affectionate greetings.

"Daddie," cried Fay, seizing her father by the arm, "one of the seven wonders of the world has happened. We have found an interesting person at Ribston Hall."

Jan took the other arm. "We can't possibly tell you all about it under an hour, so we'd better go and sit in the balcony." And they gently propelled him towards the staircase.

"Not if you're going to discuss Cousin Amelia," Anthony protested. "You have carrying voices, both of you."

"Cousin Amelia is only incidental," Jan said, when they were all three seated in the balcony. "The main theme is concerned with a queer little pixie creature called Meg Morton. She's a pupil-governess, and she's sixteen and a half--just the same age as Fay."

"She doesn't reach up to Jan's elbow," Fay added, "and she chaperons the girls for music and singing, and sits in the drawing-cla.s.s because the master can't be quite seventy yet."

"She's the wee-est thing you ever saw, and they dress her in Cousin Amelia's discarded Sunday frocks."

"That's impossible," Anthony interrupted. "Amelia is so ma.s.sive and square; if the girl's so small she'd look like 'the Marchioness.'"

"She does, she does!" Jan cried delightedly. "Of course the garments are 'made down,' but in the most elderly way possible. Daddie, can you picture a Botticelli angel of sixteen, with ma.s.ses of t.i.tian-red hair, clad in a queer plush garment once worn by Cousin Amelia, that retains all its ancient frumpiness of line. And it's not only her appearance that's so quaint, _she_ is quaint inside."

"We were attracted by her hair," Fay went on "(You'll go down like a ninepin before that hair), and we got her in a corner and hemmed her in and declared it was her duty to attend to us because we were strangers and shy, and in three minutes we were friends. Sixteen, Daddie! And a governess-pupil in Cousin Amelia's school. She's a niece of the little husband, and Cousin Amelia is preening herself like anything because she takes her for nothing and makes her work like ten people."

"Did the little girl say so?"

"Of course not," Jan answered indignantly, "but Cousin Amelia did. Oh, how thankful I am she is _your_ cousin, dear, and once-removed from us!"

"How many generations will it take to remove her altogether?" Fay asked.

"However," she added, "if we can have the pixie out and give her a good time I shan't mind the relationship so much. We _must_ do something, Daddie. What shall it be?"

Anthony Ross smoked thoughtfully and said very little. Perhaps he did not even listen with marked attention, because he was enjoying his girls. Just to see them healthy and happy; to know that they were naturally kind and gay; to hear them frank and eager and loquacious--sometimes gave him a sensation of almost physical pleasure.

He was like an idler basking in the sun, conscious of nothing but just the warmth and comfort of it.

Whatever those girls wanted they always got. Anthony's diplomacy was requisitioned and was, as usual, successful; for, in spite of her disapproval, Mrs. Ross-Morton could never resist her cousin's charm.

This time the result was that one Sat.u.r.day afternoon in the middle of June little Meg Morton, bearing a battered leather portmanteau and clad in the most-recently-converted plush abomination, appeared at the tall house in St. George's Square to stay over the week-end.

It was the mid-term holiday, and from the first moment to the last the visit was one almost delirious orgy of pleasure to the little pupil-governess.

It was also a revelation.

It would be hard to conceive of anything odder than the appearance of Meg Morton at this time. She just touched five feet in height, and was very slenderly and delicately made, with absurd, tiny hands and feet.

Yet there was a finish about the thin little body that proclaimed her fully grown. Her eyes, with their thick, dark lashes, looked overlarge in the pale little pointed face; strange eyes and sombre, with big, bright pupil, and curious dark-blue iris flecked with brown. Her features were regular, and her mouth would have been pretty had the lips not lacked colour. As it was, all the colour about Meg seemed concentrated in her hair; red as a flame and rippled as a river under a fresh breeze. There was so much of it, too, the little head seemed bowed in apology beneath its weight.

Yet for the time being Meg forgot to be apologetic about her hair, for Anthony and his girls frankly admired it.

These adorable, kind, amusing people actually admired it, and said so.

Hitherto Meg's experience had been that it was a thing to be slurred over, like a deformity. If mentioned, it was to be deprecated. In the strictly Evangelical circles where hitherto her lot had been cast, they even tried vainly to explain it away.

She had, of course, heard of artists, but she never expected to meet any. That sort of thing lay outside the lives of those who had to make their living as quickly as possible in beaten tracks; tracks so well-beaten, in fact, that all the flowers had been trodden underfoot and exterminated.

Meg, at sixteen, had received so little from life that her expectations were of the humblest. And as she stood before the gla.s.s in a pretty bedroom, fastening her one evening dress (of shiny black silk that crackled, made with the narrow V in front affected by Mrs. Ross-Morton), preparatory to going to the play for the first time in her life, she could have exclaimed, like the little old woman of the story, "This be never I!"

Anthony Ross was wholly surprising to Meg.

This handsome, merry gentleman with thick, brown hair as crinkly as her own; who was domineered over and palpably adored by these two, to her, equally amazing girls--seemed so very, very young to be anybody's father.

He frankly owned to enjoying things.

Now, according to Meg's experience, grown-up people--elderly people--seldom enjoyed anything; above all, never alluded to their enjoyment.

Life was a thing to be endured with fort.i.tude, its sorrows borne with Christian resignation; its joys, if there were any joys, discreetly slurred over. Joys were insidious, dangerous things that might lead to the leaving undone of obvious duties. To seek joy and insure its being shared by others, bravely and honestly believing it to be an excellent thing, was to Meg an entirely unknown frame of mind.

After the play, in Meg's room the three girls were brushing their hair together; to be accurate, Jan was brushing Fay's and Meg admiring the process.

"Have you any sisters?" Jan asked. She was always interested in people's relations.

"No," said Meg. "There are, mercifully, only three of us, my two brothers and me. If there had been any more I don't know what my poor little Papa would have done."

"Why do you call him your 'poor little papa'?" Fay asked curiously.

"Because he is poor--dreadfully--and little, and very melancholy. He suffers so from depression."

"Why?" asked the downright Jan.

"Partly because he has indigestion, _constant_ indigestion, and then there's us, and boys are so expensive, they will grow so. It upsets him dreadfully."

"But they can't help growing," Fay objected.

"It wouldn't matter so much if they didn't both do it at once. But you see, there's only a year between them, and they're just about the same size. If only one had been smaller, he could have worn the outgrown things. As it is, it's always new clothes for both of them. Papa's are no sort of use, and even the cheapest suits cost a lot, and boots are perfectly awful."

Meg looked so serious that Fay and Jan, who were like the lilies of the field, and expected new and pretty frocks at reasonable intervals as a matter of course, looked serious too; for the first time confronted by a problem whose possibility they had never even considered before.

"He must be pleased with you," Jan said, encouragingly. "_You're_ not too big."

"Yes, but then I'm not a boy. Papa's clothes would have made down for me beautifully if I'd been a boy; as it is, they're no use." Meg sighed, then added more cheerfully. "But I cost less in other ways, and several relations send old clothes to me. They are never too small."

"Do you like the relations' clothes?" Fay asked.

"Of course not," said Meg, simply. "They are generally hideous; but, after all, they cover me and save expense."

The spoiled daughters of Anthony Ross gazed at Meg with horror-stricken eyes. To them this seemed a most tragic state of things.

"Do they all," Fay asked timidly, "wear such ... rich materials--like Cousin Amelia?"

"They're fond of plush, as a rule, but there's velveteen as well, and sometimes a cloth dress. One was mustard-coloured, and embittered my life for a whole year."

Jan suddenly ceased to brush Fay's hair and went and sat on the bed beside Meg and put her arm round her. Fay's pretty face, framed in fluffy ma.s.ses of fair hair, was solemn in excess of sympathy.

"I shouldn't care a bit if only the boys were through Sandhurst and safely into the Indian Army--but I do hate them having to go without nearly everything. Trevor's a King's Cadet, but they wouldn't give us two cadetships ... Still," she added, more cheerfully, "it's cheaper than anything else for a soldier's son."

"Is your father a soldier?" asked Jan.