Tamsin was sitting in her favourite spot, on the broad, low, cushioned window-seat of her room. She was crooning to herself one of the quaint hymns she had learnt at her mother’s knee half a century before. She had a short, rather dumpy figure, and very homely features. Her eyes were at once shrewd and good-humoured, and she had a very pleasant smile. Her still plentiful grey hair was crowned by a plain net cap, with goffered frills, bound over the crown of the head with a broad black ribbon. In age she was some three or four years older than her mistresses, whose service she had entered soon after they left school, and with whom she had remained ever since. Tamsin was famed for her skill as a needlewoman, and this afternoon she was engaged on some fine sewing, which it was her pride to be still able to see to do without the aid of spectacles. Ethel burst into the room, and before Tamsin knew what had happened, she found herself being violently hugged. “I know all!” exclaimed the girl. Next moment she corrected herself. “No, not quite all, but much—a great deal. I have just been reading Uncle Matthew’s letter, written a little while before he died, with directions that it should be opened by me on my nineteenth birthday. And to think that you—you dear, but artful old thing—have known all these years everything there is in the letter, and yet have never breathed the least hint that I was somebody altogether different from the Ethel Thursby I have always believed myself to be!” “The secret was not mine, dearie,” replied Tamsin, as she pulled her cap into shape. “What would my mistresses have thought, if by as much as a single word, I had betrayed their trust in me? No, no, it was far better for you in every way, that you should be told nothing about these things till you were grown up. You would only have kept on bothering your child’s brain to no good purpose.” “But, oh! Tamsin, to think that my aunts are not my aunts, and that I have no more right to bear their name than the veriest beggar that walks the streets!” There was that in her voice which told the elder woman that her tears were very close to the surface.