poor; they went once a week—­Fridays—­to visit the poor of St. Matthew’s, and found the poor of St. Matthew’s on the whole unappreciative of their efforts, but that made their task the nobler.  Their house was dark and musty, and filled with little articles left them by their grand-parents, their parents, and other defunct relations.  They had no friendly feeling towards one another, but missed one another when they were separated.  They were, both of them, as strong as horses, but very hypochondriacal, and Dr. Armstrong of Mulberry Place made a very pleasant little income out of them.

I have mentioned them at length, because they had a great deal to do with Angelina’s quiet behaviour.  No. 21 was not a house that welcomed a child’s ringing laughter.  But, in any case, the Misses Braid were not fond of children, but only took Angelina because they had a soft spot in their dry hearts for their brother Jim, and in any case it would have been difficult to say no.

Their attitude to children was that they could not understand why they did not instantly see things as they, their elders, saw them; but then, on the other hand, if an especially bright child did take a grown-up point of view about anything that was considered “forward” and “conceited,” so that it was really very difficult for Angelina.

“It’s a pity Jim’s got such a dull child,” Miss Violet would say.  “You never would have expected it.”

“What I like about a child,” said Miss Emmy, “is a little cheerfulness and natural spirit—­not all this moping.”

Angelina was not, on the whole, popular....  The aunts had very little idea of making a house cheerful for a child.  The room allotted to Angelina as a nursery was at the top of the house, and had once been a servant’s bedroom.  It possessed two rather grimy windows, a faded brown wallpaper, an old green carpet, and some very stiff, hard chairs.  On one wall was a large map of the world, and on the other an old print of Romans sacking Jerusalem, a picture which frightened Angelina every night of her life, when the dark came and the lamp illuminated the writhing limbs, the falling bodies, the tottering walls.  From the windows the Square was visible, and at the windows Angelina spent a great deal of her time, but her present nurse—­nurses succeeded one another with startling frequency—­objected to what she called “window-gazing.”  “Makes a child dreamy,” she said; “lowers her spirits.”

Angelina was, naturally, a dreamy child, and no amount of nurses could prevent her being one.  She was dreamy because her loneliness forced her to be so, and if her dreams were the most real part of her day to her that was surely the faults of her aunts.  But she was not at all a quick child; although to-day was her third birthday she could not talk very well, could not pronounce her r’s, and lisped in what her trail of nurses told her was a ridiculous fashion for so big a girl.  But, then, she was not really a big girl; her figure was short and stumpy, her features plain and pale with the pallor of her first Indian year.  Her eyes were large and black and rather fine.