Living alone with one woman-servant in a small Guernsey cottage, it may be affirmed that Miss Tighe made as much of her life as any gentlewoman of modest income, and more than sixty summers, in the British dominions. Her intellectual resources were many. She was a thorough, an inborn naturalist. She played the harp, and with no dilettante touch, but as ladies early in the Victorian reign were wont to play that instrument. She drew. On stormy evenings, when she knew her voice could not penetrate the cottage window shutters, Cassandra confessed that she sang--such songs as ‘I see them on their winding way,’ ‘The Captive Knight,’ or ‘Zuleika.’ Her popularity and her influence were widespread. The figure of Miss Tighe in her red fishing-cloak, with nets, hooks, jars, boxes, bottles, overflowing from her village cart, was familiar throughout every nook and corner of the island. If she had not had the sunniest of human hearts you might have been tempted to dub her a gossip. That good old English word, however, is associated in these days with a more than doubtful spice of malice. And men and women who had known Cassandra Tighe for thirty years averred that they had never heard an unkindly judgment from her lips. She was simply a _raconteuse_--we lack the English equivalent--a sympathiser in all the vivid varying doings that constitute the lives of young and wholesomely happy people; a chronicler of news; a delighter in love affairs. Simply this. And yet, not unfrequently, Cassandra Tighe made mischief. Truthful, as far as conscious veracity went, to a fault, this excellent lady’s memory was in a chronic state of jumble; so stored, it may be, with polysyllabic names of plants, grubs, and fishes, that subsidiary human details had to be packed in pell-mell, and take their chance of coming out again untwisted. And, depend upon it, these tangled well-meaners, not your deliberate villains, are the cause of half the loves marred, the heartburnings, the jealousies, that make up the actual dramas, the unwritten three-volume novels of this work-a-day world! ‘You are going to study with a tutor, Marjorie Bartrand! With a Cambridge B.A.! With a MAN! What does your grandfather say?’ ‘I have not told him the news, Miss Tighe. I grudge giving the Seigneur such intense pleasure. “If you insist on learning Latin and Greek,” grandpapa has always said, “learn them decently. Send these trashy governesses to the winds. Be taught by a competent master.” Yes,’ cried Marjorie, bringing down a very small hand with very great energy on her knee, ‘I grudge grandpapa his triumph, but the truth must be told. Now that I have caught him, I shall begin coaching with my B.A., my Cantab, forthwith.’