Contrary to every one’s expectation, however, he got on wonderfully well with his school-fellows. Boys are tolerant enough of "queerness" if it is unaccompanied by surliness or "side." If Montagu was "green" he was also singularly obliging and good-natured. A readiness to render a good turn is a passport to favour all the world over, and when his housemaster declared Montagu to know less of other boys than any old maid in the kingdom he made a mistake. Montagu had lived a good many years with Edmund, and healthy boyhood is very much the same all the world over. He was always ready to give a construe or a copy of verses and it never ceased to fill him with wonder that the boys in his own form, so much bigger and wiser and self-assertive than he, apparently found such difficulty in applying rules he could not remember to have learnt. His accurate and old-fashioned way of expressing himself in ordinary conversation was looked upon by the boys as an especially subtle form of "rotting" or witticism; and it was quite a long time before Montagu understood how it was that his simplest remarks, offered in all good faith, were greeted with appreciative grins by his companions, who generally took it that he was parodying one of the masters. Week by week he committed fewer solecisms, and except that he seldom got into trouble over his work, which he thoroughly enjoyed, his school life was very like that of the rest and entirely happy. The same term that Montagu went to Winchester Edmund was sent to a preparatory school, also in England, and the little house at Burnhead seemed very quiet and deserted. They had all missed the old servant, Elsa, unspeakably, at first: but youth is quick to accustom itself to new conditions, and Mr. Wycherly was roused to so many fresh interests and activities that he hardly realised what an important piece of the mechanism of Remote had stopped working. But Miss Esperance mourned silently and deeply for the faithful friend and servant who had ministered to her so tirelessly, and, though neither she nor Elsa knew it, ruled her so beneficently for fifty years. After the departure of the boys, Miss Esperance grew more and more fragile till the time came when she was fain to follow Elsa, and fare forth into the unknown with the same dignified serenity that had characterised her every act during her long life of upright dealing and beautiful self-sacrifice. The end came in the boys’ second term at school.