When the company had departed Hester arranged her small troop at their desks--boys and girls and 'infants'--and made them a speech. It was a very short speech, asking for their affection, and somehow she found herself addressing it to Myra, whose dark eyes rested on her with a stare of unyielding suspicion. On hearing that the two children were to attend the Board School, Aunt Purchase had broken out into vehement protest, the exact purport of which Myra did not comprehend. But she gathered that a wrong of some kind was being done to her and (this was more important) to Clem, and she connected it with the loss of their liberty. Until this moment she had known no schooling. Her grandmother in stray hours had taught her the alphabet and some simple reading, and the rest of her knowledge she had picked up for herself. She well remembered the last of these stray hours. It fell on a midsummer evening, three years before, when she and Clem--then a child of four--had spent a long day riding to and fro in the hay waggons. Now Mrs. Rosewarne for the last few years of her life, and indeed ever since Myra could remember, had been a cripple, confined to the house or to her small garden, save only when she entered an ancient covered vehicle (called 'the Car') and was jogged into Liskeard to visit her dressmaker, or over to Damelioc to attend one of Lady Killiow's famous rose fetes. It was the hour of sunset, then, and in the shadow of the hedge old Pleasant, the waggon-horse, having Clem on his back, stood tethered, released from his work, contentedly cropping the rank grass between the clusters of meadow-sweet, and whisking his tail to brush off the flies. The horse-flies had been pestilent all day, and Myra was weaving a frontlet of green hazel twigs to slip under Pleasant's headstall, when she happened to turn and caught sight of her grandmother standing by the upper gate, leaning on her ivory-headed staff, and shading her eyes against the level sun. No one ever knew how the old lady had found strength to walk the distance from the house--for walked it she had. It may have been that some sudden fright impelled her; some unreasoning panic for the children's safety. Old Rosewarne, seated on horseback and watching the rick-makers in the far corner, caught sight of her, cantered across to the gate, dismounted there, and led her home on his arm; and the children had followed. So far as Myra could remember, nothing came of this apparition--nothing except that she found herself, a little later, seated in her grandmother's dressing-room and reading aloud; and this must have happened soon after they reached home, for while she read she heard the fowls settling themselves to roost in the hen-house beneath the open window. Three weeks later Mrs. Rosewarne was dead--had faded out like a shadow; and since then the children had run wild, no one constraining them to tasks.