“SHE’D be best at boarding-school,” said Mr. Maxwell one evening in the drawing-room, after Ursula had gone to bed. His wife and Aunt Lavvy and Grace and Nina and Stanley and Miss Roberts all agreed. Grace, because she had liked school, and was sure Ursula would like it, and had always pitied her for being cheated of it; Nina, because she honestly believed it would supply some qualities lacking in her young sister--sporting Winborough qualities; Miss Roberts, because Ursula was growing beyond her in temperament, intelligence and impertinence--and anyway, Lottie would suffice to keep her in employment until Honor Rose was old enough to require a governess; and Aunt Lavvy for a reason dissimilar to Grace’s, and also from a feeling not dissimilar to Ursula’s--that she disliked a presence at the Laburnums that understood where it did not love her. But the main reason for agreement with all of them was not mentioned; that it was impossible for the scar of recent conflict to be properly healed, or for the Laburnums to settle down to its former complacency, while the main reminder of the unusual was still in the house--reminding them. Metaphorically, they still twitched their shoulders when Ursula was about. Ursula was a dear, quaint kid, but--when people took to sacrifices you could never be sure what would be their next out-of-the-way freak. Something higher, nobler still perhaps, and even more uncomfortable.... They did not see that there was nothing to be frightened of in poor little Ursula, who was just not big enough to carry it off. If, indeed, she had followed up her lapse from the average by letting them all forget it--ah, then their spirits might well have been awed by the sudden distance separating her from the rest of them. “I’ll go and see Miss Luther tomorrow,” said Florrie Maxwell. “As you say, Nina, the term will have started, but it’s too long to wait for the half-term, so perhaps they’ll make an exception, as you and Grace were there, and let her enter at once.” Then Stanley broke it to them. “I may as well tell you now, Mother and Father”--he only called them thus when on the brink of some significant announcement--“that I’ve been negotiating for the remainder of the lease of ‘The Kopje’--we shan’t call it that, naturally. Old Gurney wants to move out at once; it’s too small for him. I think it’s fairly certain that we’ll get it. It’s time Grace and the babies had the run of their own house; and, quite frankly, sir”--turning with good-humour to his father-in-law--“from something you said to me the other day, I gathered you’d prefer it.” “Well, well.” Mr. Maxwell remembered with regret that he had been irritable in the matter. “Perhaps we are rather tumbling over each other’s toes in the old Laburnums. And as long as you’re still in the same road--we can’t let our grandchildren go too far away, can we, mother?”