was of no more use than a tripper. She was in her white muslin dress,
and he was nursing his dog, and the night was closing down on them, and
they were wobbling about under a pole and a tattered rag. But all at once
a great black yacht came heaving up in the darkness, and a grown-up voice
cried, "Trust yourself to me, dear."

It was John Storm. He had already awakened the young girl in her, and
thereafter he awakened the young woman as well. She clung to him like a
child that night, and during the four years following she seemed always
to be doing the same. He was her big brother, her master, her lord, her
sovereign. She placed him on a dizzy height above her, amid a halo of
goodness and grandeur. If he smiled on her she flushed, and if he frowned
she fretted and was afraid. Thinking to please him, she tried to dress
herself up in all the colours of the rainbow, but he reproved her and
bade her return to her jersey. She struggled to comb out her red curls
until he told her that the highest ladies in the land would give both
ears for them, and then she fondled them in her fingers and admired them
in a glass.

He was a serious person, but she could make him laugh until he screamed.
Excepting Byron and "Sir Charles Grandison," out of the vicar's library,
the only literature she knew was the Bible, the Catechism, and the Church
Service, and she used these in common talk with appalling freedom and
audacity. The favourite butt of her mimicry was the parish clerk saying
responses when he was sleepy.

The parson: "O Lord, open thou our lips" (no response). "Where are you,
Neilus?"

The clerk (awakening suddenly in the desk below): "Here I am, your
reverence--and our mouth shall show forth thy praise."

When John Storm did laugh he laughed beyond all control, and then Glory
was entirely happy. But he went away again, his father having sent him to
Australia, and all the light of her world went out.

It was of no use bothering with the clock on the back landing, because
things were different by this time. She was sixteen, and the only tree
she climbed now was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that
tore her terribly. John Storm was the son of a lord, and he would be Lord
Something himself some day. Glory Quayle was an orphan, and her
grandfather was a poor country clergyman. Their poverty was sweet, but
there was gall in it, nevertheless. The little forced economies in dress,
the frocks that had to be turned, t