dressing-table, and a jar of tall ferns in the grate.
All that was easy enough to manage, but she found it rather a trial to
have to make her own bed every day, and keep her room swept and dusted.

Living with her granny, where everything was done for her, and the
housework went on with the regularity of machinery, and without any share
in it, or interest in it, on Audrey's part, she had grown up with a
knowledge only of how things should look when done, but without the
faintest idea of how to do them, or of the trouble it cost to make things
nice, and keep them so. It had never occurred to her that to keep
furniture brightly polished, and brass and silver too, windows gleaming,
and window curtains spotless, meant constant care on somebody's part,
and hard work too. She was beginning, though, to learn the value now of
many things that she had taken for granted before.

"If one did all that needs doing about a house," she said, excusingly to
herself, "one would have no time for anything else, and I do want to
write. If I could sell my stories I could help father tremendously, and
that is far more important than dusting and cooking, and looking after the
children. Faith can do that, she has no taste for writing. When lessons
begin I shall have less time than ever for it, so I really must do all I
can now." And fired with enthusiasm and importance, she shut herself up
more and more in her attic, and Faith was left to look after her mother,
and the children, and the house, pretty much as she was before; and if the
muddle did not grow greater, it certainly did not grow less under Audrey's
rule.

"If you want to keep this house tidy you must always be tidying it,"
she grumbled, and to be always tidying it was certainly the last thing she
wished or intended. So, as long as her own attic was neat and fragrant,
she closed her eyes to the rest and was, apparently, content to let things
go on as she found them.

"Audrey, will you sit with mother this evening while I go to church?"
Faith opened her sister's door nervously, and the face which appeared
round it was decidedly apologetic. She was always afraid that she might
be interrupting Audrey at a critical point in the story she was writing,
and she generally was too.

This May Sunday was an exception though. Audrey did not write stories on
Sundays, she only thought about them. Occasionally she wrote a letter to
her granny, or to a school friend. She was thinking of