Then Aunt Amelia ceased to come, for she had gone out to India to be married, and “your Grandmother” came alone. And then Grandmother died and went to heaven, and nobody came to see Ruth any more. Only a parcel came, an event hitherto unknown in Ruth’s drab little existence, and of stupendous interest. It contained a baby’s first shoe, a curl of gold hair in a tiny envelope, labelled “Paul, aged 2,” in a pointed writing, a letter in straggling round hand beginning “My dear Mamma,” another letter in neat copper plate beginning “My dear Mother,” and a highly coloured picture of St. George attacking the dragon, signed “Paul Courthope Seer,” with the date added in the pointed writing. It was many years later that Ruth first understood the pathos of that parcel. When she was seventeen the Committee found a situation for her as companion to a lady. The Matron recommended her as suitable for the position, and the Committee informed her, on the solemn occasion when she appeared before them to receive their parting valediction, delivered by the Chairman, that she was extremely lucky to secure a situation in a Christian household where she would not only have every comfort, but even Every Luxury. So Ruth departed to a large and heavily furnished house, where the windows were only opened for a half an hour each day while the servants did the rooms, and which consequently smelt of the bodies of the people who lived in it. Every day, except Sunday, she went for a drive with an old lady in a brougham with both windows closed. On fine warm days she walked out with an old lady leaning on her arm. Every morning she read the newspaper aloud. At other times she picked up dropped stitches in knitting, played Halma, or read a novel aloud, by such authors as Rhoda Broughton or Mrs. Hungerford. Any book less calculated to have salutary effect on a young girl who never spoke to any man under fifty, and that but rarely, can hardly be imagined. If there had been an animal in the house, or a garden round it, Ruth might have struggled longer. As it was, at the end of three months she proved to be one of the Orphanage’s few failures and, without even consulting the Committee, gave notice, and took a place as shop assistant to a second-hand bookseller in a small back street off the Tottenham Court Road. And here Ruth stayed and worked for the space of seventeen years—to be exact, until the year of the Great War, 1914. The Committee ceased to take an interest in her, and her Aunt Amelia, still in India, ceased to write at Christmas, and Ruth’s last frail links with the world of her father were broken. It was a strange life for a girl in the little bookshop, but at any rate she had achieved some measure of freedom, she had got rid of the burden of her ladyhood, and in some notable directions her starved intelligence was fed.