n, the starting eyes turned
from my sister to me.

"Julia," I said, with severity, "it will be better not to have two
Richmonds in the field. I, myself, will, with your permission, give Mrs
Ragg what orders are necessary."

Then, in a tone of severity which should have been at once an
encouragement to Mrs Ragg and a reproach to my sister, I asked to have
some eggs boiled for tea.

There were no eggs.

"Go and fetch some," the irrepressible Julia cried.

"I understood the two ladies were to do their shopping themselves," the
caretaker tremblingly explained.

I said of course we would. "Press not a falling man (or woman) too
far," I quoted to Julia, as, the unhappy Mrs Ragg having left us to
ourselves, we sat down to our bread-and-butter.

Julia, although protesting in the finish that hunger still gnawed her
vitals, ate half the loaf. I, who should have been content to put up
with what remained of it for our morning meal, was unable to control my
sister's raging determination to forage that night for food.

"I refuse to starve," she said.

There was, luckily for us, a full moon, or we might easily have lost
the faintly indicated road, lightly strewn as it was with oyster-shells
and broken bricks, and ploughed through the trackless waste of sandy
desert all night. The outskirts of the town reached, there were several
mean-looking streets to pass through, before we found a shop at which
we thought it desirable to trade. As we walked, buffeted by the wind
blowing in from the sea, Julia discoursed of the caretaker of
Sea-Strand Cottage.

"That, mark my words, is a thoroughly bad woman," she declared. "She
wouldn't be such a forbidding-looking creature unless she was wicked.
It wouldn't be fair on the part of the Almighty to have made her so. I
consider her aspect thoroughly sinister."

"Poor frightened, trembling old wretch!" I said.

"Exactly. Why does she tremble? What is she afraid of? In my opinion
she is intending to murder us in our beds."

"You had better go home the first thing in the morning and leave me to
my fate," I told her. To myself I said I did not believe the world
contained another woman with the worrying capacity of Julia. It was
because she was such a disturbing force in the family that they had
been so eager for her to accompany me, I, not without bitterness,
suspected.

At the shop where we bought our chops for breakfast and a chicken for
dinner, I bethought me to enquire of the young