Janet, therefore, had spent a very lonely and isolated childhood, and, as she had grown, the affection that was in her had grown too, and she had had no one to whom she might give it. At first it had been dolls, and ugly and misshapen though they were they had satisfied her. But the time came when their silence and immobility maddened her, she wanted something that would reply to her caresses and would share with her all her thoughts and ideas. Then Miss Minns came, and Janet devoted herself to her with an ardour that was quite new to the good lady; but Miss Minns distrusted enthusiasm and had learnt, whilst educating Miss Simpson, to repress all emotion, so she gave it all back to Janet again, carefully wrapped up in tissue paper. When Janet found that Miss Minns didn’t want her, and that she was only using her as a means of livelihood, she devoted herself to animals, and in a puppy, a canary and a black kitten she found what she wanted. But then came the terrible day when her father killed the kitten, and she determined never to have another pet of any kind. By this time she was about fifteen and she had read scarcely anything. Her father never talked to her about books, and Miss Minns considered most novels improper and confined herself to Mrs. Hemans and the “Fairchild Family.” Janet’s ideas of the world were, at this time, peculiar. Her father had talked to her sometimes strangely about places that he had seen, but they had never attracted her: mountain heights, vast unending seas, tangled forests, sun-scorched deserts; always things without people, silent, cold, relentless. She had asked him about cities and he had spoken sometimes about London, and this had thrilled her through and through. What she longed for was people; people all round her, friends who would love her, people whom she herself could help. And then suddenly, on an old bookshelf that had remained untouched for many years past, she had found “Kenilworth.” There was a picture that attracted her and she had begun to read, and then a new world opened before her. There were several on the shelf: Lytton’s “Rienzi” and “The Last of the Barons,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Trollope’s “Barchester Towers,” and Miss Braddon’s “Lady Audley’s Secret.” There were some other things; somebody’s “History of England,” a Geography of Europe, a torn volume of Shakespeare, and the “Pickwick Papers.” Living, hitherto a drab and unsatisfactory affair, became a romantic thrilling business in which anything might happen, a tremendous bran pie into which one was continually plunging for plums. She had no doubt at all that there would be adventures for her in the future. Everyone, even the people in “Middlemarch,” had adventures, and it was absurd to suppose that she wouldn’t have them as well. She noticed, too, that all the adventures that these people had rose from the same source, namely love. She did not realise very thoroughly what this love was, except that it