It was spring-time, and in spring Bell Bay was perhaps a thought more perfect than at any other time in the year. The wonderful little horse-shoe of its quiet haven was a jewel of colour in the dark setting of its cliff entrance. The semicircle of the high, rough stone sea-wall above the rock-strewn sands seemed to take on light from the flowering of the tiny rock plants, while the gardens at the Bell House behind that wall were just a mass of greenness and bloom. Outside and above those gardens rose the sides of the valley, towering up into the blue of the clean, clear sky, and melting away into the woods inland. The bay was so small that the Bell House and its grounds filled the centre of it, as it were. There was no room for a "sea-front". No room for another house even--Bell Bay belonged to the Bell House. Farther up the valley was Paramore’s--the Temperance Tea Inn--to which parties came in the season by the one narrow road that ran along below the Bell Ridge--on the north side, that was. Farther still up the valley--also on the roadside--stood the tiny church, no bigger than a room, Fuchsia Cottage, where lived Anne Lasarge, and a few more cottages--not enough to make a village--that tailed away to Folly-Ho, a hamlet on the Peterock road. On the south side of the valley--facing the long, grey front of the old Bell House--the woods fringed the heights like a green rampart. Just in one place glimmered the white walls of Crown Hill, the beautiful country place of Sir Marmaduke Shard, K.C. That was all there was of Bell Bay--unless you count Mainsail Cottage, sitting like a gull’s nest over the sea on the south headland, and Woodrising, the empty house so long "To Let", buried in dense woods right up at the back of the valley. In the former lived Penberthy--pensioner--who looked after Sir Marmaduke’s little yawl--the _Messenger_. In the latter lived nobody but Mrs. Trewby, a caretaker; a mournful widow afflicted by bilious attacks, and living therefore in a cloud of her own creation. Finally, as a last word in this explanation, the Bell House was the ancestral home of the Romilly family, and Mrs. Romilly was living there with all "the family" except its head, away in command of that first-class battleship _Medusa_; and her eldest son, Malcolm, who was busy as lieutenant on the destroyer _Spite_. Now Pamela, already introduced reading a book among the rocks of this miniature haven, was absorbed in a new idea, of which the book was an outward and visible sign. Pamela was by no means a self-constituted martyr, but at the same time she believed herself to be a sort of "odd man out" in the family circle. She was thirteen--not even a long way on the road to fourteen. It must be allowed then that thirteen bore no comparison to Adrian and Christobel, who had reached sixteen and seventeen, or to Hughie, who was but seven. Malcolm, of course, was out of it altogether, being nearly twenty, and at sea.