Jane and Fanny Brook were orphan sisters of fourteen and fifteen; fine, fresh, romping girls, with crisp black hair, cheeks like roses, and ivory teeth. They looked as demure as nuns whilst Miss Clapperton was by, but no sooner was her back turned than they began to whisper and giggle. Then suddenly addressing me as I stood by them, feeling silent and lonely, Jane said-- "Will you run?" "I never run; I cannot." "Try," observed Fanny. They caught me between them and whirled me off, but they were soon obliged to pause. I had stopped short, all out of breath. "I told you I could not run," I said, a little offended at their free manner. "Poor little thing!" compassionately exclaimed Jane. "Will you race?" asked her sister. "I don't mind if I do." A laburnum, at the end of the lawn, was fixed as the goal. They made me arbiter. I sat down on a wooden bench to look; they started off at once, reached the tree at the same moment, knocked one another down in their eagerness--then rose all tumbled and disordered, and ran back to me. "I was first, was I not?" cried Jane. "Indeed you were not. It was I, was it not?" "Indeed," I replied, "I don't know which it was. I think you both reached it at once." This impartial decision displeased them both. They said I was ill-natured and sly, got reconciled at my expense, and began a gentle sport of their own invention, called "the hunt." It consisted in one of the Misses Brook running the other down, which she did most successfully, and then submitted to being run down in her turn. My arrival had converted this into a holiday; so when the hunt was over, Fanny amused herself with a bow and quivers, whilst Jane swung herself to and fro from the laburnum. I looked on with wonder, and thought I had never seen such odd girls. The strangeness of everything made the day seem doubly long. So sudden and violent a separation from all I knew and loved was more irritated than soothed by the new objects and new faces to which I was compelled to give my attention, but which could not absorb my thoughts. I welcomed evening with a sense of relief, and a hope that it would bring me silence and comparative solitude. I shared a large, cheerful, airy bedroom with the two sisters, who slept together. At first they were very quiet, but after a while I heard a low rustling sound of paper that seemed to proceed from under their bedclothes; then one whispered the other-- "Do you think she is asleep?" "Try," was the laconic reply. "What a beautiful moonlight!" observed the voice of Jane aloud. "Oh, very!" emphatically answered Fanny. "Do you like the moonlight?" asked Jane, seeming to address me. "Yes, I like it." I replied; I could scarcely utter the words, my heart was so full of the lost home, with its quaint garden, sun-dial, and old trees, on which the same moon that chequered the drawn window-blind shone at this hour.