one with the best influence. I've quite decided,
Janet! Lorraine is far and away the most suitable among the new Sixth. I
shall send for her the day before term opens and have a private talk
with her. Unless I'm very much mistaken in the girl, we shan't be
disappointed."

"I believe you are right!" agreed Miss Janet, sinking into the
easy-chair and resuming her rocking, without further remonstrance from
her now satisfied sister.

Miss Kingsley and Miss Janet had kept school together at The Gables for
the last twelve years. It was not a very large school, but then
Porthkeverne was not a very large place--only a little quaint,
old-fashioned seaside town, built down the sloping cliffs of a Cornish
cove, with its back to the heather-clad moors and its face to the broad
Atlantic. Whether you appreciated Porthkeverne or not was entirely a
matter of temperament. Strangers, whose pleasure in a summer holiday
depended on pier, esplanade, band, and cheap amusements, found it
insufferably dull, and left for the more flaring gaieties of St. Jude's
or Trewenlock Head. Porthkeverne was glad to get rid of them; it did not
cater for such as these. But there were others for whom the little town
had a peculiar fascination; its quaint, irregular houses and grey roofs,
its narrow streets of steep steps, its archways with glimpses of the
sea, its picturesque harbour and red-sailed fishing-boats, its exotic
shrubs and early flowers, its yellow sands and great pinnacled crags,
the softness of the west wind and the perpetual dull roll of the
Atlantic breakers cast a spell over certain natures and compelled them
to remain. Visitors would return to it again and again, and some of
them, who were free to live where they chose, would take houses and
settle down as residents. Over literary and artistic people Porthkeverne
seemed to exercise a special charm. Authors and artists had collected
there, and, partly attracted by the place and partly by each other's
society, had formed an intellectual colony that centred round the Arts
Club in the old Guildhall down by the harbour.

Marine painters, and those who sought to immortalize peasant life on
their canvases, found ample subjects among the crags and coves and
sea-weed-covered rocks where the blue water lapped softly, or the white
waves came foaming and churning up; and the fisher-folk, bronzed,
blue-eyed, and straight of limb, were models to set the heart of a
Millet or a Wilkie on the thrill. To