“Miss Atkins says she loves God, and I asked her whether father did. She was shocked, and said of course he did, because he was a curate. I wish he loved _me_, but I don’t think he does. He is nearly always cross, and I’m always being punished.” Miss Page let the book fall on to her lap. Mechanically she turned her face towards the meadows with their islands of motionless trees emerging from the mists. But she did not see them. The childish words, already considerably more than forty years old, already a little yellow and faded, had brought into sight instead, the dreary house in Tufton Street. With the clearness and precision of actual vision, she saw the narrow staircase covered with oilcloth, which led up to the bedroom in which she had spent so many hours of solitary confinement. She saw the pattern on the shabby wall-paper. She saw her little iron bedstead, covered with a counterpane of thick white material, with a raised pattern upon its surface; the curtains of dingy drab rep on either side of a red blind; the outlook across a leaden street, swept by wind and rain. She thought of her father, a morose, irritable man whose persistent bad temper, condoned to himself under the guise of necessary chastisement, had driven her brother from the house. She remembered him in the clothes of his office, shabby and ill-cut, going doggedly about the duties which in later years she knew had been uncongenial. Half reluctantly Anne took up the book again. “I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother--a cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to let me come. Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it). Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much, but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting, but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea is quite blue.