ives an
embrace a meaning beyond mere convention, but she only said, "I must go
and see Miss Bird. I suppose she is in the schoolroom." She gathered up
her skirts and went upstairs, but when the twins had given Cicely a
boisterous hug, they went back to their mother, and walked on either
side of her. She was still the chief personage in their little world,
although their father and even their brothers were of so much more
importance in the general scheme of things. And not even in the presence
of their father and brothers did they "behave themselves" as they did
with their mother.

The schoolroom was at the end of a long corridor, down two steps and
round a corner. It was a large room, looking on to the park from two
windows and on to the stableyard from a third. There were shelves
containing the twins' schoolbooks and storybooks, a terrestrial and a
celestial globe, purchased many years ago for the instruction of their
great-aunts, and besides other paraphernalia of learning, signs of more
congenial occupations, such as bird-cages and a small aquarium, boxes of
games, a big doll's house still in tenantable repair though seldom
occupied, implements and materials for wood-carving, and in a corner of
the room a toy fort and a surprising variety of lead soldiers on foot or
on horseback. Such things as these might undergo variation from time to
time. The doll's house might disappear any day, as the rocking-horse had
disappeared, for instance, a year before. But the furniture and other
contents of the room were more stable. It was impossible to think of
their being changed; they were so much a part of it. The Squire never
visited the room, but if he had done so he would have recognised it as
the same room in which he had been taught his own letters, with
difficulty, fifty years before, and if any unauthorised changes had been
made, he would certainly have expressed surprise and displeasure, as he
had done when Walter had carried off to Oxford the old print of Colonel
Thomas on his black horse, Satan, with a view of Kencote House, on a
slight eminence imagined by the artist, in the background. Walter had
had to send the picture back, and it was hanging in its proper place
now, and not likely to be removed again.

Miss Bird, commonly known as "the old starling," to whom Mrs. Clinton
had come to pay an immediate visit upon entering the house, as in duty
bound, was putting things away. She was accustomed to say that she spent