class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 30]"/> or out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure," our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all.

Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in all things else.

I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I recognised her accomplishments as among our best family assets—reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger, soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the paths appointed.

Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected against colds, against fatigue.

There is, in almost every house, one main concern.

When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable.

But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable.

I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or away from our mother, until—but that is to come later.

I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car—the first we had encountered at close quarters—a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded her dreadful errand—to invite us children to come and stay at her house in Brighton from Friday to Monday!

We stood there, blank, speechless.

Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse.

Relief and pride rushed together. I could have kissed my mother's feet. My own could hardly keep from dancing.

"Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor.

The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs.

Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will not let anyone take you away—no, never. Very well, you shall not pay visits."

And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not never?"

"Not never."

Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word!

CHAPTER VI
MARTHA'S GOING—YET REMAINING

When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had been with us since she was fifteen—at first a little scullery-maid. Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of her youth and her love of fun.

We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring us our presents at the same time—perhaps out of fear of the cook, who held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was elderly, and very easily annoyed.

She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if ever we spoke of these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any more. So we were most careful.

So was Peter.

So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to go down the garden and wait for them—wait so long, sometimes, that we fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning.

Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye—though she wasn't ever coming back, the cook said.

Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room.

In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom what had become of Martha.

Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone under.

"Under? Under what?"

Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!"

I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person.

I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She chased me out with a hot frying-pan.

We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter.

As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon she went away.

We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.

Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid us back.

I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died. And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they had four little children left. And one or other of the children was always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a fearful lot of poultices.

Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too, and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called "Household Medicine." I read it a great deal—especially when one of the little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their sufferings.

One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs. Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the