ST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"The men would salute their old General, the General salute his old
regiment"

"Sir Robin Drummond had come to Mary's side, and turned the page of
her music"

"'Do you know what I came here in the mind to ask you?'"

"'Miss Nelly is in the drawing-room, sir'"

MARY GRAY

CHAPTER I

WISTARIA TERRACE

The house where Mary Gray was born and grew towards womanhood was one of
a squat line of mean little houses that hid themselves behind a great
church. The roadway in front of the houses led only to the back entrance
of the church. Over against the windows was the playground of the church
schools, surrounded by a high wall that shut away field and sky from the
front rooms of Wistaria Terrace.

The houses were drab and ugly, with untidy grass-plots in front. They
presented an exterior of three windows and a narrow round-topped
hall-door which was a confession of poverty in itself. Five out of six
houses had a ramping plaster horse in the fanlight of the hall door, a
fixture which went with the house and was immune from breakage because
no one ever thought of cleaning the fanlights.

In the back gardens the family wash was put to dry. Some of the more
enterprising inhabitants kept fowls; but there was not much enterprise
in Wistaria Terrace.

Earlier inhabitants had planted the gardens with lilac and laburnum
bushes, with gooseberries and currants. There were no flowers there that
did not sow themselves year after year. They were damp, grubby places,
but even there an imaginative child like Mary Gray could find
suggestions of delight.

Mary's father, Walter Gray, was employed at a watchmaker's of repute. He
spent all his working life with a magnifying glass in his eye, peering
into the mechanism of watches, adjusting the delicate pivots and springs
on which their lives moved. His occupation had perhaps encouraged in him
a habit of introspection. Perhaps he found the human machine as worthy
of interest as the works of watches and clocks. Anyhow, in his leisure
moments, which were few, he would discuss curiously with Mary the hidden
springs that kept the human machine in motion, the strange workings and
convolutions of it. From the very early age when she began to be a
comfort and a companion to her father, Mary had been accustomed to such
speculations as would have written Walter Gray down a madman if he had
shared them with the grown people about him rather than with a child.