aid no more, but I know he thought me a selfish spoilt child.
And from that moment he set himself to watch grandmamma and to find out
if anything was really the matter.

He _did_ find out, and that pretty quickly, I fancy, that we were much
poorer. But it was very difficult for him to do anything to help
grandmamma. She was so dignified, and in some ways reserved. She got a
letter from Mrs. Nestor a few days later, thanking her for reading with
Jerry again, and saying that of course the lessons must be arranged
about as before. And it vexed her a very little. (She has told me about
it since.) Perhaps she was feeling unusually sensitive and depressed
just then. But however that may have been, she wrote a letter to Mrs.
Nestor, which made her really _afraid_ of offering to pay. It was not as
if there was time for a good many lessons, granny wrote--would not Mrs.
Nestor let her render this very small service as a friend?

And Jerry did not know what he _could_ do. It was not the season for
game, except rabbits--and he did send rabbits two or three times--and I
know now that he scarcely dared to stay to tea, or _not_ to stay, for if
he refused granny seemed hurt.

On the whole, nice as he was, it was almost a relief when he went away
back to school.

Still things were not so bad as in winter. I was really all right
again, and a little money come in to grandmamma about May or June that
she had not dared to hope for. We got on pretty well that summer.

None of the Nestors came to Moor Court at all. Gerard joined them for
the long holidays in Switzerland. Mrs. Nestor wrote now and then to
granny, and Sharley to me, but of course there was not the least hint of
what Gerard had told them. I think they believed and hoped he had
exaggerated it--he was the sort of boy to fancy things worse than they
were if he cared about people, I think.

And so it got on to be the early autumn again. I think it was about the
middle of September when the first beginning of the great change in our
lives came.

It was cold already, and the weather prophets were talking of another
severe winter. Grandmamma watched the signs of it anxiously. She kept
comparing it with the same time last year till I got quite tired of the
subject.

'Really, grandmamma,' I said one morning, 'what does it matter? If it is
very cold we must have big fires and keep ourselves warm. And one thing
I know--I am not going to be shut up again like last winter. I am goin