' exclaimed the old lady, 'now I understand.'

'But we love him just as much--_quite_ as much as if he was our whole
uncle,' said Frances, eagerly. 'He's perfectly--oh, he's as nice as he
can _possibly_ be.'

Lady Myrtle smiled, and gave a little pat to Frances's shining tangle of
curly hair.

'Good-bye then, my dears, for to-day,' she said.

But she stood at the gate looking after them till they reached
the corner of the lane, when some happy impulse made
Jacinth--undemonstrative Jacinth--turn round and kiss her hand to the
solitary old figure.

'She's like a sort of a grandmother to us,' said Eugene. 'What a good
thing,' with extreme self-complacency, 'I made you go in!--what a good
thing I was'--after a great effort--'wursty!'

But Jacinth's face was slightly clouded. She drew Frances a little apart
from the others.

'Frances,' she said severely, 'you must have more sense. How could you
begin about those girls at school?' Lady Myrtle, if she does notice us,
won't want to hear all the chatter and gossip of Miss Scarlett's. And
it's such a common sort of thing, the moment you hear a name, to start
up and say "Oh, _I_ know somebody called that," and then go on about
your somebodies that no one wants to hear anything of.'

Frances looked rather ashamed. She was barely two years younger than her
sister, but on almost every subject--on questions of good manners and
propriety above all--Jacinth's verdict was always accepted by her as
infallible, though whence Jacinth had derived her knowledge on such
points it would have been difficult to say. No one could have been less
a woman of the world than the late Mrs Denison; indeed, the much misused
but really sweet old word 'homely' might have been applied to her in its
conventional sense without unkindly severity. And no life could have
been simpler, though from that very fact not without a certain dignity
of its own, than the family life at Stannesley, which was in reality the
only training these girls had ever known.

'I'm very sorry, Jass,' said the younger sister, penitently. 'It was
only--it did seem funny that her name was Harper, when I am so fond of
Bessie and Marg'----

'I'm getting tired of your always talking of them,' said Jacinth. 'I
daresay they're nice enough'----

'And they're _quite_ ladies,' interposed Frances, 'though they are so
very poor.'

'I wouldn't look down on them for _that_; I should think you might know
me better,' said Jacinth. 'We'r