Such was the state of things in the Villa Chantilly when, one morning early in March, there arrived from Miss Dolly’s elder sister in England a letter which seemed likely to change the whole course of my future. It told how there had come to the school a gentleman making anxious inquiries about me, Beatrice Warmington, and how this gentleman was my uncle, Mr. Jasper Rosebury. I had never heard of such a relation, and at first I simply refused to believe in his existence. A few more sentences of the letter, however, proved most indisputably that Mr. Rosebury had married my mother’s elder sister, that she had died young, before my mother was married herself, and that he had then gone to Australia, where he had remained ever since. I had, of course, never even heard his name; for when my parents were alive I was too young to understand anything about our family history, and my guardian had probably never thought it worth while to trouble himself to make known to me the facts concerning my aunt’s early marriage and death. Besides, Jasper Rosebury had not been heard of for some years, even by his own relations. The letter, moreover, informed us that my Uncle Jasper was about to come to the villa, and take me away from school and all school authority for good, to live with him. It was against this plan that I was raising up such energetic objections. I did not wish to leave my bright, enjoyable life at the villa; I did not wish to have an old gentleman, such as my imagination represented my uncle, for a constant companion; and, most of all, I did not wish to be separated from Lily. Besides all this, I had taken a whimsical but most resolute dislike to my uncle, simply because I had a prejudice against his Christian name, Jasper. The scene grew more and more disturbed round the breakfast-table that morning in the Villa Chantilly. Miss Dolly remonstrated, coaxed, cried, made a faint attempt at scolding, and then cried again. As for myself, I did nothing but repeat over and over a most flat and unequivocal refusal ever to live with Uncle Jasper. He would be here to-morrow, Miss Dolly sobbed. Then let him be here; that made no difference to me. I would not go with him. “Oh, Beatrice!” here put in Lily’s sweet, low voice—she had been making attempts from time to time to still the storm—“if it was only my dear mother’s brother, whom she used to tell me so much about, come back, how happy—” But here I broke in upon her with, “I wish, Lily, that you and Miss Dolly were tied up in a bag with all the old rusty, musty uncles and aunts going, then, I should think, you’d both have a jolly time of it.” After that I flounced out of the room, banging the door after me.