"Dear Susie," said Anna tenderly, putting her arm round her, ready to acknowledge all, and more than all, the benefits she had received, "you have been only too kind and generous. I know that I owe you everything in the world, and just think how lovely it is for me to feel that now I can take my weight off your shoulders! You must come and live with _me_ now, whenever you are sick of things, and I'll feel so proud, having you in my house!" "Live with you?" exclaimed Susie, drawing herself away. "Where are you going to live?" "Why, there, I suppose." "Live there! Is that a condition?" "No, but Uncle Joachim keeps on saying he hopes I will, and that I'll settle down and look after the place." "Look after the place yourself? How silly!" "Yes, you haven't taught me much about farming, have you? He wants me to turn quite into a German." "Good gracious!" cried Susie, genuinely horrified. "He seems to think that I ought to work, and not spend my life talking _Klatsch_." "Talking what?" "It's what German women apparently talk when they get together. We don't. I'd never do anything with such an ugly name, and I'm positive you wouldn't." "Where is this place?" "Near Stralsund." "And where on earth is that?" "Ah," said Anna, investigating cobwebby corners of her memory, "that's what I should like to be able to remember. Perhaps," she added honestly, "I never knew. Let me call Letty, and ask her to bring her atlas." "Letty won't know," said Susie impatiently, "she only knows the things she oughtn't to." "Oh, she isn't as wise as all that," said Anna, ringing the bell. "Anyhow she has maps, which is more than we have." A servant was sent to request Miss Letty Estcourt to attend in the drawing-room with her atlas. "Whatever's in the wind now?" inquired Letty, open-mouthed, of her governess. "They're not going to examine me this time of night, are they, Leechy?" For she suffered greatly from having a brother who was always passing examinations and coming out top, and was consequently subjected herself, by an ambitious mother who was sure that she must be equally clever if she would only let herself go, to every examination that happened to be going for girls of her age; so that she and Miss Leech spent their days either on the defensive, preparing for these unprovoked assaults, or in the state of collapse which followed the regularly recurring defeat, and both found their lives a burden too great to be borne. There was a preliminary scuffle of washing and brushing, and then Letty marched into the drawing-room, her atlas under her arm and deep suspicion on her face. But no bland and treacherous examiner was visible, covering his preliminary movements with ghastly pleasantries; only her mother and her pretty aunt. "Where's Stralsund?" they cried together, as she opened the door. Letty stopped short and stared. "What's that?" she asked. "It's a place--a place in Germany."