“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs. Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paper had pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And the garden was all shining with dew, and everything look _enchanted_. “I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday, and I was _too_ happy. But now I shall never go there again, because father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me, I think.” Her eyes still fixed on the round handwriting, Anne’s memory was working. Years later she knew that her old friend had once loved her mother, his cousin and playfellow. At her father’s death she had found, on going through his papers, the letter in which he had offered to provide for the child of the woman who would not be his wife. It was a letter full of tact and delicate feeling, but it indicated how much of the little girl’s loneliness he knew and understood. He pointed out that companions of her own age were necessary for the happy development of her temperament. He wanted to educate her with some neighbour’s children, so that she might live at Fairholme Court, in the country which she loved. She was not strong, he declared, and London air obviously did not suit her. There would of course be no attempt to separate her from her father. She could return to him during the holidays, whenever he wished to see her. It was a letter written from full knowledge of the circumstances. He knew the atmosphere of struggling poverty in which Anne, as the daughter of a curate with an income of little more than a hundred a year, passed her existence. He knew also that the man had little tenderness for his daughter, and he hoped that his suggestion might come as a relief. Even at the age of twelve, Anne could have undeceived him. Already, unable as yet to put her knowledge into definite form, she knew her father well. Gloomy and morose, a man of narrow intelligence and invincible obstinacy, he resented any overtures which to his mind savoured of patronage. In later years Anne knew the bitterness of his life. The son of a rich stockbroker, he had just finished his course at Cambridge when the financial ruin, which killed his father, struck the death-blow to his own ambitions also. He had been reading for the Church, with dreams, easy as it then seemed to be realized, of a splendid living, and a possible bishopric. The girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of an impoverished Irish landlord, was penniless.