At half-past ten years old, Laura went to school and then came home again, with the simple directness of the King of France.

It was her own fault, as she candidly admitted to herself—her own, Justin’s a little, still more Mr. Kipling’s, but mainly and responsibly, her own. You observe that she did not blame Aunt Adela at all. She was always a just child.

And yet, of course, it was Aunt Adela who had been anxious for at least a year that Laura should go to school, who had said so, plaintively, once to Papa, who did not commit himself, and incessantly to Brackenhurst; for boarding schools had a Refining Influence ... and Companionship, you know ... and she had a bosom friend, a Miss Massingberd, such an Intellectual woman, who had recently opened a school and needed pupils....

Upon the horns of that altar Aunt Adela intended that Laura, entirely for her own good, should be offered up; for Aunt Adela was indefatigably benevolent at second hand. She used to make opportunity for little chats with Laura, and paint flamboyant pictures of the delights that awaited her if she would only tell Gran’papa that she should like to go to school. (Already the household was finding Laura a convenient mediator.) Laura listened politely, with her head on one side, like a wary robin. But she, too, did not commit herself.

One unlucky morning, however, fate overtook her.

She was engaged at the time in the particularly fascinating occupation of tidying Mrs. Cloud’s wardrobe drawers. If I were Laura, I could write a poem on Mrs. Cloud’s wardrobe, big as a little house, brown and grained and polished like a horse-chestnut or a ha’penny bun, with its clinking handles and the long looking-glass door, which, as it swung open, reflected in the mantel-glass opposite your own side face, unfamiliar, gratifying. It had dark shelves that ran up like ladder-rungs to the ceiling—but they pulled out disconcertingly if you tried to climb—and great drawers in which you could easily have hidden Prince Charlie (lying flat with blouses over him) what time the Butcher and his Southrons clanked up the stairs. Oh, the long shelves and the deep draws it had, all vaguely sweet with orris-root and lemon-weed, and the piles of smooth linen (Laura’s night-dresses were flannel, a hygienic brown) and the tiny scented bags that dropped from them, tied up with rainbow ribbons! And there were boxes—Japanese boxes—each with its special smell of lace or leather, and its name upon its lid in golden handwriting; and a little wicker basket where the dead gloves went, that Laura might take for finger-stalls or gardening; and shawls for dressing-up, and a feather fan, and a scarf from India all sewn over with silver and as heavy as a tennis net, for playing mermaids. There was a piece-drawer like Mrs. S. F. Robinson’s enchanted bag; and a carved comb six inches high and once, in a corner, candles and glass balls from last year’s Christmas tree; and little trinket cases that Laura was allowed to open, and the great jewel box with the baize petticoat that was always locked because it had diamonds inside it, and Justin’s watch, and more rings than would go on all Laura’s fingers, counting thumbs.

The sea hath its pearls, and argosies unload in London Town; but have you ever tidied Mrs. Cloud’s wardrobe?

Tidying (she called it tidying!) this delectable wardrobe that day, what should Laura come upon but a fat bundle which, deposited with the dumb eloquence of a retriever on Mrs. Cloud’s lap, was deprived of its elastic band and displayed to her as a sheaf of reports—Justin’s reports at his preparatory school. She was allowed to go through them, and because she could not help wheedling explanations out of a particularly busy Mrs. Cloud, to read to herself a few, a very few, of Justin’s letters home. Here was literature indeed! There was Shakespeare, no doubt: there was the B. O. P. There was Louisa Alcott and Sir Thomas Malory; but what were such scribblers then to Laura reading Justin’s letters home?

To top that revelation came Stalky and Co. for a birthday present.

Naturally she dreamed of going to school herself. In that mood Aunt Adela surprised her, and, striking while the iron was hot, settled matters with her, with her own friend, and with Papa, who wrote, in grim silence, the necessary cheques. He had never approved of boarding schools for his women-folk.

Neither did Laura. The door of the prim drawing-room had not closed behind Aunt Adela, she had barely rubbed Aunt Adela’s farewells from her cheeks, before she had realized that she had been trapped again, that she hadn’t intended to go to school, that she would never meet Beetle at ‘The Laburnums,’ and that she was stuck there for a term at least, because, when there is a chance that they may be read by Mrs. Cloud who would tell Justin, one does not fill one’s letters home with supplications and lamentings. Justin never once said that he wanted to come back!... Finally, she was going to be horribly homesick....

She was. She was put into the lowest class and she hated every one. Exile, of the body or of the mind, always roused, and always will rouse in her, I think, a bitter, ardent devil, that, when she was a child, was completely beyond her comprehension or control. She, who was all for peace and pleasantry and quiet life, found herself involved in wars and rumours of wars, in quarrels and injustice and defiances, that stamped themselves heavily, like a blind pattern, upon a solid background of nostalgia, so that she spent her days, like any cat, fighting and dreaming.

She endured for a full term: packed, in spite of protests, all her property at the end of it: bade a polite and final farewell to a bewildered head-mistress, and then came home again. Once there, she refused to budge.

She needed a whipping, of course. Brackenhurst, deeply interested, urged it upon Aunt Adela. But somehow it was difficult to inflict upon the soft-eyed, mouse-like creature that was Laura—until you roused her. And Laura never let Aunt Adela rouse her now-a-days, was a good little girl and an obedient, with her Aunt Adela. As Adela admitted to Brackenhurst, she was, in daily life, docile enough. Aunt Adela, who could not understand her contradictions, never realized that you might prune as you pleased—if you left her roots alone.

But Laura had it out with a grimly smiling grandfather, who did not appear surprised. He heard what she had to say, discussed the matter with her as he never did with Adela, and, to every one’s horror, let her have her way. Possibly Laura’s challenge to her aunt—“Why can’t Gran’papa teach me? He knows tons more than Miss Massingberd”—tickled him.

At any rate Laura stayed at home, and her education, as it achieved itself between the two of them, with occasional help from Justin, was, if irregular, at least essentially satisfying. She was, of course, if you contrast her provision with the full fare of the schools, fed and clad but scantily; but her scraps fell at least from ambrosial tables and her rags were cloth-of-golden. And she throve. That is certain.

Aunt Adela’s next move, naturally, was to demand a governess. But even her assiduity had not been able to discover any one whom Gran’papa could endure for more than a month. A week was usually enough for them both. With visitors, half-hour visitors, he found it hard enough to be uncritical; but to have a stranger, and a feminine stranger at that, with an inevitable mannerism to jar his fidgety niceness, definitely established in his household, drove him into a fever of nervous irritation. His patient daughter did her best, but it required more nerve than she possessed to say, however sweetly, to an efficient young woman with certificates and a silk petticoat: “Oh, by the way, Miss—er—, you don’t blow your nose at meals, do you?” and after the rout of Miss Runciman with her nervous little giggle, of Miss Sandys who would talk to Papa while he was eating, and of Miss Jenkins who used slang and dropped her g’s, Aunt Adela decided that an English girl without an affectation was beyond discovery, and that Papa must look after Laura’s education by himself. Can you hear her sotto-voce indignation? Can you see her washing her long, twitching hands of the whole affair? There is no doubt but that Papa was exceedingly trying. All Brackenhurst knew it and pitied the poor lady. But neither Brackenhurst nor she herself ever had the moral courage to tell him so.

Laura, however, was none the worse off. She could read and write, had the run of two houses in the matter of books, and Justin—never again so divinely discerning—Justin had given her a paint-box. Thus equipped, she was left to potter at her own pace along the road to knowledge of those inner and outer worlds in which, for the next fifty years or so, she was to stage her eternal comedy of existence.

And she enjoyed herself. At ten—twelve—fourteen—she enjoyed herself, Æsthetically at least, as keenly and painfully as at any later period, blissfully absorbed in words and colours and sounds, in discovering that the sky is awfully blue and the earth so green, so green; but that if she said big words to herself from Gran’papa’s dictionary, ‘azure,’ ‘translucent,’ ‘emerald,’ ‘lapis-lazuli,’ sky and earth would deepen and glow till she was dazzled, and that, although she could not get what she saw on to paper, juicy as Winsor and Newtons were, at least she could always try. And there the sable paint-brush was certainly a help, though expensive!

And though in these, as in all her adventures, she was unescorted, she was not lonely. She was always aware that there were guiding hands to right and left of her if she chose to stretch out her own. Hands, indeed, that were inclined to tug in opposite directions, and so, perhaps, held her the steadier between extreme and extreme; for an intelligent young man convinced that he understands everything, and a wise old one, still more sure that he knows nothing, are no bad teachers for an imaginative child, who worships the one and honours the others.

Justin, because she saw less of him; because he was young; because he made her laugh; because he forgot her for months and then remembered her again; because he let her play in his room and learn her geography from his stamp album, and put her in charge, in his absence, of his innumerable collections; because he had white teeth and delightful crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he put back his head and laughed at her; because, in short, he was God—Justin, naturally, influenced her development more than old Mr. Valentine, though he, in his cold way, was less unconscious of responsibility than Aunt Adela would have you believe. Yet the amazing, amusing contrast in the two men’s attitudes to life and Books (the choice of capital is Laura’s) developed in her, all unconsciously, a sense of humour, which is a sense of proportion, that never withered, though she is to starve it ruthlessly in the years that are labelled discreet.

When, for instance, Gran’papa’s grudging and suspicious recognition of those hot-bloods Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Dickens, was compared in her alert mind with Justin’s yawning admission that he really must wade through ’em all some day, she would give a little gurgle of laughter all to herself, though she did not really know why. But she was sure her mother would have laughed too in that half-forgotten fascinating way of hers and have made the funniness obvious to Laura. Laura was sure of that. Even Sam Weller was not quite so funny when you met him by yourself—but when Mother had read it aloud—oh, did the twins remember? But the twins never remembered anything. Never remembered, never cared for anything but trains, and rigging up telephones in the cherry trees, and catapulting robins, never wanted Laura except at night when there were stories to be told, or when they quarrelled with each other in the day-time. And certainly never noticed much difference between the edition of Alice that Gran’papa produced from a corner of his bookshelf one birthday and the parcel from Justin by the post, with the same familiar letterpress and most unfamiliar drawings by a certain sacrilegious Mr. Rackham. There again Gran’papa’s indignation, though she agreed with him, struck her as humorous. In short, she was beginning, what with one mentor and the other, to form a judgment of her own, not to mention a morality. The fundamental ‘shalt nots,’ built up secretly, like coral rocks, in her childish deeps, were, in the lull that precedes the teens, beginning to show starkly above water.

“Never, never cry.

“It’s nice to be in the right, but it makes them squash you.

“Never argue with Gran’papa.

“Never remind Justin of what he said last holidays.

“Never say you’re tired.”

In matters of art, too, though she enjoyed trying to look through both ends of her human opera-glasses at once, she had got into a habit (in self-defence, as if it were) of using her own eyes in daily life. Glasses were a revelation, of course, either end of them. Justin’s display of remote, romantic figures with curvy throats who really lived, in London, and waved Yellow Books (a horrid colour) and sniffed at Gran’papa’s Michael Angelo because he had a broken nose and couldn’t sniff back, was as exciting as it was bewildering; but Gran’papa’s method of magnifying, clarifying the old-fashioned deities of an art dictionary into solid, satisfactory men and women, had also its charm for her. And the woman in her, that must dislike change of any kind, found Gran’papa the more dependable. Justin had such different interests each holidays (he left delicious books behind him when he went back to college) that it was difficult to keep up; but Gran’papa would, on any given evening, be found reading the Noctes Ambrosianae with the same absorption as on any previous evening of all Laura’s years: Gran’papa could be trusted to say—“Pretty enough, pretty enough—but what about feet? Hands and feet, my dear, hands and feet, if you want to learn to draw,” when he was shown the latest ‘head’ (there were half a dozen battered casts for the borrowing—CÆsar, Clytie, Antinous—in the village schools) upon which Laura had spent herself and her time and her beautiful fourpenny indiarubber.

Yes—Gran’papa was dependable. He damped her, but she was already intelligent enough to enjoy the tingle of his cold water, and, always protesting, to know him in the right. Yet how she grudged him his rightness! At twelve years old there is not much charm in a plaster cast of a foot or in a muscular gentleman with his skin off, when Clytie, half enchanted, smiles from her petals, and you have made up your mind to do the most beautiful copy of her that the world has ever seen by lunch-time, only coloured, pale pink Clytie and orange sunflower, and send it in to the Academy and get made an R.A. like Angelica Kaufmann, who wasn’t even English, as a little surprise for Justin.

She was always, in secret, fantastically ambitious, but her R.A. was one cobweb with her Helen of Troyship (you should have seen Laura going straight to headquarters—Olympus—and talking out the whole wretched business with Zeus) or with the regency she undertook after delivering up Elizabeth (in chains) to Mary Queen of Scots, reinstated and regal and happily converted to Protestantism entirely through Laura’s indefatigable personal exertions. For Laura, to Aunt Adela’s edified relief, was whole-heartedly Anglican, in spite of having to learn collects. She did not explain, if she knew it, that church was a perpetual joy because it had three stained-glass windows with crimson figures, black crimson like the darkest carnations in the big border, or Gran’papa’s port, a crimson to make a small girl squirm with inexplicable pleasure: And because she could sit there and plan out the frescoes she would one day, when she was grown-up and an R.A., paint all over the white-washed walls and up into the barred ceiling, being conveyed thither nightly by the Archangel Raphael, who used to paint pictures too, in Rome, before he was made a seraph, and so would naturally be interested. The congregation, of course, were to be kept in ignorance of the artist and a weekly increasing amazement until it was finished. All but Justin. She would simply have to tell Justin....

That characteristic thought would be realized in characteristic fashion. She was always dying to talk to him, and there was never any time; for Justin even when not enclouded in a silence that might not be broken, a silence which always made Laura, quite unnecessarily, feel rebuked, must still be considered, at any rate in his twenties, to have enjoyed life most in monologue. So Laura, obedient to the latest addition to her Codex Justinianus, “Never worry him to talk,” evolved a system of imaginary conversations which more or less satisfied her. She invented a Justin of her own, a Justin identical in speech and manner and appearance, a Justin who accompanied her wherever she went, into whose sympathetic ear she poured, with a sort of passionate vivacity, every thought and wish and fear and marvel of her developing mind.

It was curious to catch her unawares, to see her trotting down a garden path, obviously absorbed in a discussion that required nods and laughter and expressive hands, and little quick, questioning, upward glances, while she endeavoured in vain to keep step with the long stride of an Invisible.

Intercourse with this Invisible who to Laura was one with—was, indeed, the real Justin, was so satisfying that when he arrived in the flesh for his holidays, she was able to be satisfactory in her turn, to exist demurely as no more than a domestic pet, with a trick of loosening his tongue for him and the still more stimulating habit of listening in intelligent admiration while it wagged.

She was quaintly accustomed, in the first half-hour of reunion, to a sensation of depression, to be chilled, startled into faint, disloyal protest—“But—but this isn’t Justin! I forgot he was like this.” And then she would round indignantly upon herself—“Anyhow I like him this way.” But in a day or two ideal and real would have more or less melted into one again, obstinate discrepancies being explained away by Laura airily enough—“It’s because I’m not grown-up.” Her child’s faith in that panacea was almost as strong as her faith in Justin. Yet that last would be sorely tried upon occasion. Their differences, when they occurred, were catastrophic—very funny to watch. There is the old simile of the Skye and the mastiff: or imagine, if you like, Bottom in the Bower, and Titania nearly frantic with him for not knowing (there’s the trouble—she would not mind nearly so much if it were pure wickedness, done a-purpose) but for not knowing that he had just sat down so heavily upon a spread of cowslips that there is little chance of a single gold-coated pensioner being left alive when he gets up again. Not that it is fair to compare Justin with Bottom. Justin, even in the twenties, was not in the least egregious, only solid. He couldn’t help it, could he, if he hadn’t any faults, or that his kindly tolerance of her tantrums could drive Laura into nothing more or less than a fuming replica of her Gran’papa’s canary? (You never realized how red Laura’s hair was until you saw her in a passion.) But, in those encounters, there was revealed a duality of temperament, a distinction in quality, a difference in their grip of life, in the mere meaning, sometimes, that they attached to the words they used, which made you marvel at the attraction that they undoubtedly had for each other. For if Laura enjoyed living in his pocket, Justin would have been equally disconcerted if, one fine day, he had not found her there, like his loose money, and his handkerchief, and his pencil-case, ready to his hand. Yet, as I say, they sparred. There was a clash of claims occasionally. It was not always easy to reconcile “what Mother used to do” with “Justin says.”

There were the birds’ eggs, for instance, cause of the most serious of their differences and the last, before she became a big girl and went away to France to be finished, as Aunt Adela phrased it. Justin, as you know, had the magpie instinct that as pleasantly infantizes the ponderous male as a pink paper cap from a cracker the bald head of an uncle at a Christmas dinner. He collected—as Brackenhurst, wisely refusing to involve itself with the objective case, would explain to its visitor behind a kid glove or a convenient Prayer Book—

“Yes—the Cloud pew—the only son. Oh, rolling! Oxford—intellectual, you know——He collects.”

Brackenhurst was right: he did collect. Collect? He trawled. There were no half-way measures. Interest him in a subject, from CÆsar’s wives to PalÆolithic Toothpicks, and he had no peace until he had pursued that subject, netted it, stunned it with books of reference, stripped it of its robe of mystery, taken it to pieces, turned it inside out. And finally, when it was quite dead and done for, and its poor soul fled, he would hang up the dry bones in triumph in his den and look round for some one upon whom to discharge his accumulated information.

His mother was usually the sacrifice—his mother in her pretty parlour, with Justin’s Progress running round the walls chronologically, from ‘Grace Darling’ and ‘Hope’ on the orange, to Burne-Jones, ‘Marriage À la Mode,’ Post-Impressionism, and Japanese prints. She did not really mind, though he scraped the wall-paper dreadfully shifting things each holiday, and she couldn’t see why he should insist on moving ‘Wedded,’ into Cook’s bedroom, though Cook, of course, was very pleased. But sometimes, especially in the Beardsley phase, she did wonder, uneasily, if she were being over-educated.

Yet his changes of view did not disturb her as they disturbed Laura, because, wise for all her simplicity, she could always trace them back, as Laura could not, to the influence of the moment. He had so many acquaintances whom he called friends, he, who had never yet felt the need of a friend.

It was always the same. Damon collected stamps for a fortnight, and Justin, Pythias of the hour, would go and do likewise, and be amazed, a year later, to find that Damon showed no interest in the three albums he had contrived to fill meanwhile, beyond merely and inaccurately protesting that the beastly things always had bored him anyway. Justin could not understand that. Through the school years, however, he had naturally attracted his like and possessed, in consequence, a heterogeneous treasury of coins, and cigarette pictures, and birds’ eggs, and butterflies, and walking sticks, and medals, all correctly labelled and cased, and faithfully supervised by Laura, into whose charge they had long ago been given, partly because he was genuinely fond of his foundling and ready to humour her, partly because he had been impressed, from the first, by her neat ways and dexterous finger-tips. He admired neatness and precision as only a thoroughly untidy man can, and Laura always knew where he had left his tobacco pouch.

He seldom entirely outgrew his crazes, could always be fired anew by a rummage. Cigarette pictures, certainly, had definitely ceased to charm him, to the benefit of the twins (Laura, jealous-eyed, did not in the least appreciate the compliment of being passed over) but he still brought home an occasional carved stick, and his fourpenny bits and George III pennies had one by one given up their pads of honour to quite rare and beautiful coins. In fact, if he had not met Bellew——

And then it rained.

Justin yawned and fidgeted about the room, and settled down to a book and shut it up again with a bang and sent it skating across the polished table. He wanted to go out.... He had nothing to do.... Vacation was rather a bore sometimes.... He wondered if he should get out his stamps.... He hadn’t looked at his stamps lately.... Stamps were rather a bore.... He yawned again.

“‘Rain, rain, go to Spain,’” chanted Laura, drumming on the glass. She was kneeling on the window-seat, looking out at the wall of wet leafage that faced her across the lawn, for the garden had been hung on the breast of deep woods. Mrs. Cloud complained that the trees darkened the house and made it damp, and Justin would offer to have them thinned, and then Mrs. Cloud would talk hurriedly about central heating, and Justin would laugh at her; because his mother had never yet been known to sanction the destruction of an acorn. She had the characteristic passion of a shy woman for trees—for the quiet, deep-rooted trees that shelter and enclose.

“‘Rain, rain——’” began Laura again, energetically.

“Oh, stow it, Laura!” grunted Justin.

But the rain, either because, like any one else, it hates to hear its name shouted after it, or because it had been at work since seven and it was now close upon eleven o’clock, did suddenly slacken and waver in a half-hearted and apologetic fashion that was most encouraging.

“It’s stopping! It’s going! You see in five minutes! I knew it would, or the birds wouldn’t make such a row. Look at them on the lawn, Justin.” She thrust her open palms out of the window to feel the weather. “It is stopping.”

“Oh, by the way, that reminds me,” Justin brightened. “Let’s have a look at the birds’ eggs. Haven’t seen ’em for years.” And he took the key of the fat little cabinet from a reluctant Laura. But he did not notice her reluctance. “Ever heard of Bellew?”

“British Feather Folk?” Laura glanced up at a row of maroon volumes.

“Yes.” Then, as he wrenched at a stiff drawer: “I say, you can’t have dusted here lately.”

She flushed.

“I just hate——” she was beginning, and then she checked herself. “What about him, Justin?”

“Oh, I came across him last term. He was lecturing. I tell you, he’s a man and a half. What he doesn’t know about birds would go into a wren’s egg. We pal’d up, rather. He’s quite young. He’s made me as keen as mustard. Of course I know nothing compared with him. He spends his life at it.”

“Taking birds’ eggs?” enquired Laura frigidly. “Like a little boy?”

But he swept on unheeding. He had got his half-a-dozen sectioned trays pulled out and spread round him on the floor.

“Not much here,” he commented disgustedly. “Sparrows and chaffinches and robins. Bellew would hoot.” He laughed. “That’s the right word. He’s like a bird himself, you know. All the birds that ever were, rolled into one. Cocks his eye at you before he speaks and ruffles up his hair like a parrot when he’s keen. I never knew such a man. They say South Kensington would give its ears for his collection. And he can tell you every blessed thing every blessed bird in England thinks, or says, or does, from the egg on. You should hear him doing the notes. Hear that blackbird in the wood? You can’t tell whether that squawk is temper, or a worm gone down the wrong way, or a love affair. Nor can I. But if you got hold of Bellew——”

Laura sniffed. She was sorry, but she did not like Mr. Bellew, and she didn’t care who knew it.

“It’s squawking at Tom. He’s always under that nest. He got two of the babies last year. And it’s not a blackbird, it’s a garden warbler. They always build in that tree.”

“A garden warbler? How do you know?”

“British Feather Folk.” Laura twinkled. And then—“Mother loved birds.”

He scanned his trays.

“What luck! I haven’t got a garden warbler. And it’s stopped raining. Come on and show me the nest.”

“Justin, you’re not going to take the eggs?”

“Well, what do you think? I tell you I’m going in for it again—seriously. Come on.”

She made no movement. He glanced up at her, surprised by her silence into an observant glance.

“What’s up, Laura?”

She turned a distressed face to him.

“If you start—Wilfred and James will think they can too. And it’s been so difficult to stop them.”

He laughed.

“If you think you can stop kids taking eggs——”

“But they haven’t. Not once. Mother hated it so. But if you start——”

“My good kid, where’s the harm? Birds can’t count.”

She flamed up at him in her sudden way.

“Harm? How would you like having your insides blown out before you’d ever been born?”

He chuckled and took up his cap.

“Oh, rot! Come on!”

She shook her head.

“Oh, all right then!” and he ran downstairs whistling.

She sat on the window-seat, her leg tucked under her and watched him swing across the lawn and dive into the wood, and still sat there, twiddling the latch and thinking things out. After all, did it matter?... Birds had so many children.... Birds couldn’t count.... If Justin began collecting eggs again he would be in the woods all day.... Would it—could it matter just going with him?... If one didn’t take eggs oneself?...

But the facts were too clear for her. Birds-nesting was cruel.... Mother never let you.... There was nothing—nothing to be done....

Justin had been gone ages.... She supposed he would be out all the morning now.... He had left the room in a most dreadfully untidy state.... Oh, well!

She set to work.

It was in a very damp heap, on a very tidy floor, that half an hour later a tactless maid discovered her. But Laura, scrambling to her feet, forestalled all comment.

“I happen,” said Laura, with great dignity, “to have a little bit of a cold. It’s lunch-time, isn’t it? Good-bye, Mary. I’m going home now.”

And home she went.

Her guardian angel was very much pleased with her. But the devil, who happened to be passing, though he offered his congratulations, opined that it would be worth his while to come back that way in a year or two.