"But I did not love my lessons."

"Lazy, Margaret Anstruther? Why not?"

"I do not know; I do not think I was lazy. Miss Bidwell would not have permitted me to be so, but she made everything seem rather dull."

"What did that matter? You had a chance of learning things," said Eleanor. The mocking note had gone from her voice, which had become very earnest. "Apparently you had nothing to do all day long but learn, learn, learn. Lucky, lucky girl, and yet you say everything seemed dull. Would that I could have changed places with you sometimes."

"I am sure the arrangement would have pleased me also," said Margaret.

"But I do not think you would have liked it. As soon as Miss Bidwell saw that I was growing too fond of one subject it was her habit to discontinue my study of it, until she saw that my interest in it was less strong."

"But what an extraordinary governess!" exclaimed Eleanor. "What on earth made her behave like that?"

"My grandfather had given strict orders that I was not to be allowed to become too absorbed in any particular study. He did not want me to neglect one thing in favour of another."

"But just to take a nice, lukewarm, lady-like interest in all of them,"

said Eleanor. "I see. But please go on, and tell me some more about yourself. Where are you off to now, and why?"

"I am going to a place called Windy Gap, near Chailfield. At least Chailfield is the name of the station. Windy Gap is a little village four or five miles off, and right on the top of the downs."

"And I am going to Seabourne, which is about three or four miles away from Windy Gap, on the other side," said Eleanor. "How very funny!"

"I think it is very pleasant to hear that you are going to be so close to me," said Margaret rather shyly. "Perhaps we shall see each other sometimes."

Eleanor shook her head. "I, for one, shall have no time for visiting,"

she said, "as you will understand when it comes to my turn to tell you about myself. But we will finish with you first. Why are you going to Windy Gap?"

"My grandfather thought I was not very well, for one day he found me talking in the wood to myself and wishing for all sorts of parties, and so he sent for a doctor, who said I must go away for a long change; and so grandfather wrote to Mrs. Murray, an old friend of his who lives at Windy Gap, and asked her if she would have me on a visit."

"And didn't you nearly go off your head with delight when she said she would?"

"No," said Margaret, with a little sigh, "for my mode of life there will be very much the same as it has always been at home. Lessons all day long, and no one to speak to."

"But there will be your hostess at least," said Eleanor encouragingly.

"Come, Margaret, do not despair."

"But she is deaf," said Margaret, in the same melancholy tone. "And I believe she is also very severe. But," brightening, "I am not going to think about her now, for I have got you to talk to for another hour.

It's just one o'clock, and my train does not go until seventeen minutes past two."

"The 2.17 is my train too," said Eleanor. "But what do you say to having lunch now. I am getting hungry."

She produced a little paper bag from the basket in which she carried her books, and offered one of the two buns the bag contained to Margaret. But the latter suddenly remembered that the housemaid Lizzie, in spite of the confusion that had reigned in the kitchen regions since Mrs. Parkes had been laid low, had found time to pack up an excellent little lunch for her.

"It is in the bag you told me to put in the cloakroom," she said. "If you do not mind very much, would you be so kind as to come and help me to get it out. I do not like going there alone."

"What! are you shy?" said Eleanor, with considerable amus.e.m.e.nt, and to herself she wondered why her grandfather had let such a very inexperienced girl as this travel alone. But in spite of Margaret's shyness Miss Carson felt quite interested in her new acquaintance. There was a serious, old-fashioned air about her that made her unlike any other girl that Miss Carson had ever met, and, as it was shortly to transpire, she had known a great many, and was therefore competent to give an opinion on that point. Margaret's very speech was different to that of other girls. It was so slow and careful, and she appeared to phrase her sentence with a deliberation that Miss Carson found both quaint and pleasing. Decidedly, she thought, this chance acquaintance was worth pa.s.sing the next hour or so with, if only for the sake of the secret amus.e.m.e.nt she was affording her, and so, at Margaret's timid request, she rose willingly enough and accompanied her to the cloakroom. Then, having recovered the bag, they returned to the waiting-room, which they were glad to find was still unoccupied by any one else.

Inside the bag there was a tin biscuit-box, the contents of which, when spread out on the table, made quite a tempting-looking lunch. There were chicken and tongue sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, covered jam puffs, grapes, raisins, and almonds, and a bottle of delicious home-made lemonade.

In her determination that Miss Margaret's holiday should begin pleasantly with a good luncheon on the journey, Lizzie had put up enough for two persons at least.

"Perhaps," said Margaret gleefully, when she had persuaded Eleanor to abandon her buns and to share this sumptuous meal, "she knew that I should meet a friend. Do you know," she added, "that this is the very first picnic I have ever attended in my life, though I have read of them, of course, in books."

CHAPTER V

ELEANOR CARSON

A picnic! Eleanor was conscious of a sudden feeling of pity for her newly made acquaintance. She called this meal, partaken of in the dusty, dingy little waiting-room of a noisy junction in company with a girl whom an hour ago she had never met, a picnic.

Memories of gay, delightful river picnics, of mountain picnics, of picnics in ruined castles shared with numerous boy and girl friends flashed through Eleanor's mind. And this girl whose lot she had found it in her heart to envy a short time back had known none of these things.

"And had I not met you," Margaret was saying confidingly when Eleanor came out of the sombre mood into which she had suddenly fallen, "I should never have had the courage even to open my lunch, at least I could not have eaten it in a railway carriage with every one staring at me. Could you have eaten your lunch under such circ.u.mstances?"

"Oh, yes, I think I could," Eleanor returned with some amus.e.m.e.nt.

Probably their ages were very much the same, but what a child Margaret was compared to her! To make up for that, however, she certainly used much longer words.

"How did your grandfather come to allow you to travel alone?" she asked suddenly. "From what you have told me about him I should have thought it was the very last thing he should have allowed you to do."

"He was very reluctant to give me permission to travel without an escort," Margaret answered, "but he was unable to avoid doing so." And then she related how the housekeeper who was to have brought her had broken her leg, and how a sudden epidemic of scarlet fever in the village had made it advisable for her departure not to be delayed.

"Of course," she added, "my grandfather was not aware that I should miss the train and be obliged to wait here, or else I am quite sure he would not have allowed me to come by myself. But please, please do not let us talk about me any longer. I want to hear about you now and, except that your name is Eleanor Kathleen Carson, I do not know anything at all about you."

"There is not much to tell," returned Eleanor; "and what there is is not particularly interesting; but fair is fair, as the children say. Know, then, to begin with, that I have even fewer relations in the world than you, for I have none at all."

"None!" Margaret exclaimed incredulously. "Then with whom do you live?

Where is your home?"

"I have no home. I have been earning my living for the last three years,"

Eleanor answered.

"Earning your own living. But are you not too young to do that? In what manner do you earn it?"

"As a governess. I have been an instructor of the young for the last four years," Eleanor said, laughing a little at the expression of boundless amazement which this statement brought to Margaret's face. Indeed, for a moment the latter suspected her new acquaintance of joking. She found it hard to believe that a girl of her own age should actually be a governess. She had thought that all governesses were of Miss Bidwell's age, and like her, too, in appearance.

"I wish you had been my governess, then," she said earnestly.

"It would have been rather a farce if I had been," Eleanor retorted, "for I have an idea that you know very much more than I do; not that that would be difficult, for I know nothing. Listen, now, and I will tell you all about myself. I am Irish. My father died when I was four, and two years later my mother married again."

"Oh!" said Margaret, with intense interest and sympathy in her voice; "and then they cast you adrift to earn your own living?"

"No," said Eleanor, with some amus.e.m.e.nt in her voice, "they did nothing of the sort. Besides, you can't very well cast a small person of six adrift, as you call it, to earn her own living. On the contrary, my stepfather was as kind to me as if I had been his own child, and I could not have loved him more if he had been my own father whom I scarcely remember. We were so happy together, we three. My stepfather just adored my mother, she worshipped him, and they both spoiled and petted me. My stepfather was a very rich man. He was English, I must tell you, but he had come to Ireland on a visit, and there it was he met my mother; and to please her when they were married he bought a lovely estate in Kerry, which was her county, and became an Irishman, as he used to say. Until I was fifteen I did exactly as I liked all day. I rode, of course, and hunted, and lived an outdoor life, and though I had a governess and was supposed to do lessons occasionally, it was only very occasionally that I showed my nose in the schoolroom. And then, when I was fifteen, our happy life came to an end. One morning my stepfather got a letter at breakfast to say that the solicitor who had charge of all his money had committed suicide two or three days before, and that it had been found that he had made away with huge sums belonging to his clients. We were absolutely ruined.

"The news was such an awful shock to my stepfather that it brought on an attack of the heart, to which he was subject, and he died that night; and my mother died a few weeks later. She could not, she told me, face life without him, and she pined away and died simply of a broken heart."

Eleanor's voice had become rather husky as she spoke the last few sentences, but she did not cry, she only sat and stared rather fixedly at the various timetables with which the table was strewn.