“In this room a girl sat, darning stockings and crying quietly to herself—­crying because her brother David had gone to Oxford the day before, and she was afraid he would find it hard work to live on his scholarship with the small help she could give him, afraid that he might find himself shabby and feel it bitter, afraid that he might not come back to her the kind, clear-eyed boy he had gone away.

“She told me all about it as simply as a child.  Didn’t seem to find it in the least odd to confide in a stranger, didn’t seem at all impressed by the sudden appearance of my fashionably dressed self!

“People, I am often told, find themselves rather in awe of me.  I know that they would rather have me for a friend than an enemy.  You see, I can think of such extraordinarily nasty things to say about people I don’t like.  But this little girl treated me as if I had been an older sister or a kind big brother, and—­well, I found it rather touching.

“Jean Jardine is her funny little name.  She looks a mere child, but she tells me she is twenty-three and she has been head of the house since she was nineteen.

“It is really the strangest story.  The father, one Francis Jardine, was in the Indian Civil Service—­pretty good at his job, I gather—­and these three children, Jean and her two brothers, David and Jock, were brought up in this cottage—­The Rigs it is called—­by an old aunt of the father’s, Great-aunt Alison.  The mother died when Jock was a baby, and after some years the father married again, suddenly and unpremeditatedly, a beautiful and almost friendless girl whom he met in London when home on leave.  Jean offered no comment on the wisdom or the unwisdom of the match, but she told me the young Mrs. Jardine had sent for her (Jean was then a schoolgirl of fourteen) and had given her a good time in London before she sailed with her husband for India.  Rather unusual when you come to think of it!  It isn’t every young wife who has thought on the honeymoon for schoolgirl stepdaughters, and Jean had seen that it was kind and unselfish, and was grateful.  The Jardines sailed for India, and were hardly landed when Mr. Jardine died of cholera.  The young widow stayed on—­I suppose she liked the life and had little to bring her back to England—­and when the first year of her widowhood was over she married a young soldier, Gervase Taunton.  I’m almost sure I remember meeting him about—­good-looking, perfect dancer, crack polo player.  They seem, in spite of lack of money, to have been supremely happy for about three years, when young Taunton was killed playing polo.  The poor girl broke her heart and slipped out of life, leaving behind one little boy.  She had no relations, and Captain Taunton had no one very near, and when she was dying she had left instructions.  ’Send my boy to Scotland.  Ask Jean to bring him up.  She will understand.’  I suppose she had detected even in the schoolgirl of fourteen Jean’s most outstanding quality, steadfastness, and entrusted the child to her without a qualm.