It was her first experience of a really luxurious bed, for she had been better housed and better fed at school than as a dependant in Mrs. Baynhurst's household. She ought really to have gone to sleep, but whenever she closed her eyes some new thought of the morrow and of all the other morrows would make them spring open again. The events of the last few hours had been so new that they had left her startled out of her usual quiet acquiescence. Mrs. Brenton's warm sympathy seemed to Caroline a heaven-sent gift. She had never realized the lack of this sympathy in her life till now, nor, in truth, all the many other things that she had lacked--those trivial everyday things which stock the lives of most young creatures. Her childish joys had all been secondhand ones. She had never had holidays, never any excitement; there had been no Christmas or birthday presents for her, no books or work-baskets, lace collars or ribbons. As a matter of fact, she did not even know on what date she had been born, and except for her school friends, and the little children whom she had taught the last two years, she had never been kissed. Yet for all this she had been a happy child and a happy girl. Her orphanhood had cast no blight upon her, and she had made pleasures for herself out of her very unpromising surroundings, as most healthy young creatures will do. Perhaps her greatest trial since she had lived with Octavia Baynhurst had been the fact that she had never once left London, and the call of the country to her nature at times had been so pressing that she had felt like a wild flower cribbed and confined in a world of bricks and mortar. There had not even been a green leaf on which she could look. Mrs. Baynhurst did not care for flowers. Neither did she consider it necessary that anybody required exercise or fresh air. Caroline had been rather a plump girl when she had said "good-bye" to her school, but she had wasted woefully in the last ten months. Though she had called herself strong when she had been speaking to Rupert Haverford, she possessed at this moment very little of her normal physical strength, but she had the force of a powerful will (although up to the present she had had scant opportunity of exercising this) and great courage, and to this she added the blessed gift of a cheerful spirit. With the very smallest encouragement Caroline Graniger would be happy. There was nothing lachrymose about her or subservient. She had gone to Mrs. Baynhurst's primed with good intentions and eager to give of her very best to the woman who had claimed her. Her schoolmistress had evidently been relieved to pass on the responsibility of Caroline to some other person, and, at the same time, had been rather flattered that one of her pupils should have been called upon to fill an important post with a person of such mental eminence.