the world, but to love God best. When I stoutly declared that I loved father better than anyone in any world, she said I was a naughty child. I did not mind that—I kept on saying that I loved father best.

Then I got quite well and was sent to school, to a funny sort of little day school, where I did not learn a great deal, but made friends slowly with other children. I liked school better than home, for Aunt Penelope was always saying, "Don't, don't!" or, "You mustn't, you mustn't!" when I was at home; and as I never knew why I should not do the things she said I was not to do, I kept on doing them in a sort of bewilderment. But at school there were rules of a sort, and I followed them as attentively as I could.

Thus the years went by, and from a little girl of eight years of age I was a tall, slender girl of eighteen, grown up—yes, grown up at last, and I was waiting for father, who was coming back for good, and my heart was full to the brim with longing to see him.

CHAPTER IV

During all these long years I had grown to tolerate Aunt Penelope. I found that her bark was worse than her bite; I found, too, that if I let her alone, she let me alone. She was always changing Buttons, and the new boy was invariably called Jonas, just as the last had been. The parrot kept on living, and kept on shouting at intervals every day, "Stop knocking at the door!" but he never would learn any fresh words, although I tried hard to teach him. He did not like me, and snapped at me when I endeavoured to be kind to him. So I concluded that he was a kind of "double" of Aunt Penelope, and left him alone.

The little house was kept scrupulously clean, but the food was of the plainest, and Aunt Penelope wore the oldest and shabbiest clothes, and she dressed me very badly too. At that time in my career I did not greatly mind about dress. What I did mind was that she never would let me talk about father. She always shut me up or turned the conversation. She had an awful book of musty old sermons, which she set me to read aloud to her the very instant I began to ask her questions about my father, so that by degrees I kept my thoughts to myself. I wrote to father from the very first, but I never got a reply. I used to post the letters myself, so I knew they must have reached him, but he never answered, and as the years went on I wrote less often, for you cannot keep up a correspondence on one side only. I used to wonder at the time if Aunt Penelope kept back his letters to me, but I did not like to accuse her of such a monstrous crime.

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