I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled. My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried out, "Oh, you dears--you poor darlings!" And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his sister's hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my grandmother's neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do when we were in any trouble. "I like you! You are good!" he said. Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in spite of his title, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head of our family. Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma--that is, to the best of my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a little more content. With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother introduced herself. "Child," she said to Miss Irma, "I am your nearest neighbour. Who should come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of Heathknowes. It is my goodman's saw-mills that you hear clattering from where you stand, and I am come to see if there is anything I can do to help you." "I thank you----" began the girl, and then hesitated. She had meant to declare that they wanted for nothing, perhaps to indicate that the wife of a tenant was hardly a fitting "first-foot" to venture over the threshold of a baronet of ancient name and of the sister who acted as his sponsor, tutor and governor. But then Miss Irma did not know my grandmother as Eden Valley did, still less as we who were, as one might say, of Caesar's household. "Let me come in--I will soon see for myself!" quoth my grandmother, and marched straight into the front hall of the Maitlands, that immense dusky cavern I had only once looked into over the pikes and pitchforks. She carried Sir Louis, tenth baronet of that name, on one arm. With her free right hand she went hither and thither, sweeping her hand along the ledges of great oak cabinets, blowing at the dust on the stone mantelpiece, and finally clearing the great curtained south-western window to let in the sun in flakes and patches of scarlet and gold. Then she turned to Miss Irma and said in the tone of an expert who has inspected a grave piece of work and not found it wanting, "You have done very well, my dear!"