It must have been a strange sight to see us, seated of an evening in a little semicircle, Jeremy with the three younger of his sisters--but always without Aphra, or Euphrasia, as I found her real name to be. And these occasions were by no means unwelcome. For, mad as the women were, there was about them something of the village "innocent," lit with a certain flame of religious enthusiasm. They were very different from that tall, stern figure of granite--their elder sister. Honorine, who had had some training in dressmaking, was always at work with futile industry, confectioning some garment which, when finished, was more like the dress of a Christmas guiser or carnival clown than a respectable garment for everyday use. Her sisters, Camilla and Sidonia, sat looking listlessly at nothing, or engaging in purposeless infantile controversies with one another. Jeremy at one end of the circle sat strumming fitfully upon his latest instrument, violin or Jew's harp, his half-savage music breaking in upon Honorine's ceaseless chatter without prelude or apology. But these interruptions did not in the least put out his sister. She was proud of some remnants of a former short-lived beauty, and loved to recount and magnify the ancient flames she had kindled when "head of a department," dictating the fashions to the good ladies of Thorsby at Hood and Truslove's long extinct but once celebrated emporium in the High Street there. It did not occur to me till afterwards that I ought to have been frightened--thus sequestered from the world, and my life hardly worth five minutes' purchase, if I should chance to incur the anger of one of those mad creatures. But at the time I sat with my French grammar on my knees, thinking chiefly how funny it was to see the five of us all seated with the soles of our feet turned to a blank wall. This we did for the warmth of the dividing wall. And indeed it was never cold--for before my side had time to cool, Jeremy was firing up his oven again for the next batch of bread to feed the Deep Moat Grangers and their guests. That these could be dangerous thieves and murderers, in spite of the gossip I had heard, never crossed my mind. They were to me, as I think to Mr. Ablethorpe, just so many poor things who had lost their senses. I noticed, however, that all except Jeremy were accustomed to hush their voices when they spoke of their terrible sister Aphra. And little by little I was able to draw from Honorine (who, above all things, loved to talk) the sad history of their wanderings. I will not attempt to reproduce in detail all her babblings. Indeed, she never quite finished a sentence. Nor did she ever continue where she left off. But, so far as I understood her relation, controlled as it was continually by the denials of Sidonia and Camilla, and punctuated by the scornful strains of Mad Jeremy, the story of the Orrin family amounted to this--