Produced by Susan Skinner, Chris Curnow, Pamela Patten and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: THE GIRL’S OWN PAPER VOL. XX.—NO. 1005.] APRIL 1, 1899. [PRICE ONE PENNY.] [Illustration: THE HOUSE WITH THE VERANDAH by Isabella Fyvie Mayo.] _All rights reserved._] CHAPTER I. A lady came out of a little house set in the corner of a quiet street on the northern edge of Bloomsbury. The house she left was tiny and odd-shaped, and seemed to have been built as an afterthought on a remnant of ground spared from the erection of its high, solemn, symmetrical neighbours, which towered two storeys above it. Among the dark dingy brick houses its front alone was painted, and it was also rounded in form, probably to give a little more space to its small rooms. It had a verandah too, whose top made a sort of balcony for the upper windows, and the whole was decorated by bright hardy creepers. As the lady left the house, she proceeded to cross the road. About midway she paused, and looking back, she smiled and nodded to somebody not very distinctly visible. Then something moving at the French window opening on the verandah caught her eye. This was a maid-servant with a little child, and the lady, nodding with greater energy and kissing her hand, hurried on her way. She had a light, swift step, and a bright mobile face. But it bore a strain of repressed, intense emotion scarcely to be understood in a pretty young woman with a houseful of living treasures. On and on she went, threading her way across squares and along streets, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, her thoughts evidently turned within herself. At last she emerged at the south-western side of Bloomsbury, into a street chiefly taken up by shops and hotels. She slackened her pace a little, as one may if one wishes to prolong a pleasant hope which may not be crowned by realisation. She paused opposite a shop window, wherein, backed by a half-curtain of heavy green serge, stood three low easels. Two bore sketches, one of an opal dawn over a mass of low red roofs; the other of a lurid sunset above a forest of spires and masts rising from a purplish mist. But the centre easel was empty. She gave a slight exclamation, and hastily entered the shop. She was not long inside. When she came out, she had her purse in her hands. Though she had a smile on her lips, the emotion in her face was but more vivid, as if fuel had been added to the inner flame. She did not retrace her steps to the little corner house with the creeper-draped verandah. She went on westward, through the quiet streets at the back of Oxford Street until she reached a long, decorous thoroughfare many of whose doors were adorned with brass plates bearing the names of well-known doctors. Again she slackened her pace and looked at her watch.