When we got to my room I lit all the bits of candle, and made quite a strong light; and then I opened the miniature frame, and told Alex to kneel down by me and I would show it to him. He looked at it very earnestly. He himself was strangely like the miniature, but I don't think the likeness struck him particularly. Nevertheless, he had his sensibilities, and his lips quivered, and his soft, gentle brown eyes looked their very softest and gentlest now as they fixed themselves on my face. "Poor mother!" he said. He bent his head and kissed the glass which covered the pictured face. I shut up the case hastily. "You are in rare luck to have it," he said. "Yes," I answered; "it is a great comfort to me. This is mother; this is the woman I love; no other can ever take her place." "Of course not," said Alex. "And some day when I'm rich you'll let me have it photographed, won't you?" "Indeed I will. We'll stick to our bargain, won't we, Alex?" Alex rose to his feet. He yawned slightly. "I'm dead-tired, and I must go to school to-morrow. I haven't looked at one of my lessons, but it doesn't really matter. When the Professor is away marrying, you know, he can't expect his children to work as hard as they do when he is at home." "Oh Alex, Hannah said something dreadful!" "As though anybody minded what she said!" "She said that mother--our little, young, pretty mother--was killed. She said mother would have been in the world now if she hadn't been killed." "That's all stuff!" said Alex. "Why do you speak in that exaggerated sort of way? If she had been killed there would have been a coroner's inquest and a trial, and the murderer would have been discovered and-- and hanged. Why do you talk such rot?" "Oh, there are many ways of killing a person, and mother died for want of sunshine." "Oh, I see. Well, well! good-night." He kissed me again and left the room. During the next day or two I was very busy. Father had said that the house was to be put in order. Now, what that meant I could not tell, but the house on the whole was about in as much order as such a great, desolate, and unfurnished abode could be. But when the next day at breakfast I found a second letter from father on my plate, and when I opened it and read father's own directions that the spare room was to be got ready for the reception of himself and his wife on the following Sunday, I knew that Hannah and I must come either to open war or to a dismissal of the latter. I went down to the kitchen and told her at once. "The spare room, forsooth!" she said. "Well, yes, I thought of that last night. Master said it was to be put in order, but he needn't have written; I'd have seen to it."