Poor little Anne! Of all the family, to her the change was the greatest grief. The tour on the Continent had been a dull affair to her; she was of the age to weary of long confinement in the carriage and in strange hotels, and too young to appreciate ‘grown-up’ sights. Picture-galleries and cathedrals were only a drag to her, and if the experiences that were put into Rosella’s mouth for the benefit of her untravelled sisters could have been written down, they would have been as unconventional as Mark Twain’s adventures. Rosella went through the whole tour, and left a leg behind in the hinge of a door, but in compensation brought home a Paris bonnet and mantle. She seemed to have been her young mistress’s chief comfort, next to an occasional game of play with her father, or a walk, looking in at the shop windows and watching marionettes, or, still better, the wonderful sports of brown-legged street children, without trying to make her speak French or Italian—in her eyes one of the inflictions of the journey, in those of her elders the one benefit she might gain. She had missed the petting to which she had been accustomed from her grandfather and from all of us; and she had absolutely counted the days till she could get home again, and had fallen into dire disgrace for fits of crying when Ellen’s weakness caused delays. Martyn’s holidays had been a time of rapture to her, for there was no one to attend much to her at home, and she was too young to enter into the weight of anxiety; so the two had run as wild together as a gracious well-trained damsel of ten and a fourteen-year-old boy with tender chivalry awake in him could well do. To be out of the way was all that was asked of her for the time, and all old delights, such as the robbers’ cave, were renewed with fresh zest. ‘It was the sweetest and the last.’ And though Martyn was gone back to school, the child felt the wrench from home most severely. As she told me on one of those sorrowful days, ‘She did think she had come back to live at dear, dear little Hillside all the days of her life.’ Poor child, we became convinced that this vehement attachment to Griffith’s brothers was one factor in Mrs. Fordyce’s desire to make a change that should break off these habits of intimacy and dependence.