"But listen, Mrs. Dew, there is the cottage—the little cottage off the kitchen where your bedroom is now—why not bring your things and furnish it and the housekeeper’s room and there would be a home for your niece?" Mrs. Dew turned very red. "It’s most uncommon kind of you, sir," she said, "but I shouldn’t like to take advantage of you. You see, it’s just when the young gentlemen would be at home her holidays come, and perhaps——" "That, surely, would be the very time when she could be of most use to you." Mrs. Dew looked queerly at Mr. Wycherly, then, as though forcing herself to speak against her will, she said slowly: "You see, sir, I must be straightforward with you. If Jane-Anne was like some girls—like what I was myself—I shouldn’t ’esitate to accept your very kind offer, for it would make a great difference to me. I hate choppin’ and changin’ and if I may make so bold, sir, you need a staid person here to look after things, but Jane-Anne’s the sort of child what crops up continual. I _couldn’t_ promise for ’er as she’d keep ’erself to ’erself like she ought. I’d do my best, sir, to keep her in our own part of the ’ouse, but——" Mrs. Dew paused and shook her head. Whenever she was very much in earnest she dropped into the speech of her youth; the aitchless, broad-vowelled talk of the Cotswold country whence she came. "But, I shall like to see your niece about the house," said Mr. Wycherly. "It will be pleasant to have a young girl growing up in our midst, good for me and for the boys." Again Mrs. Dew gave Mr. Wycherly that queer look, half-scornful, half-admirative. "You mustn’t think, sir, that there’s any real ’arm in Jane-Anne," she said earnestly. "There’s nothing of the minx about her, I will say that; but—I don’t know how to put it without being hard on the child, and yet it wouldn’t be fair to you, sir, to let her come without telling you——" Again Mrs. Dew paused and Mr. Wycherly looked rather anxious. "She do make a sort of stir wherever she do go and that’s the long and short of it." And Mrs. Dew relapsed into broadest Gloucestershire again as she blurted out this startling fact. "Stir," Mr. Wycherly repeated, "stir. Do you mean that she is a particularly noisy child?" "No, sir, not that. Jane-Anne isn’t that; but she does things no other child ever thinks of doing and you can’t seem to guard against it. The very first month she was at the asylum, she went and put ’er foot through a staircase window trying to see some soldiers as was passing. They had a board meeting about it." Mr. Wycherly laughed. "It is unusual to put one’s foot through a window, but surely that was an accident and not a moral offence?"