“She certainly is.  I don’t know whether that’s enough to explain it,” I commented.  “And did your mother’s step-sister go abroad with them?”

“I believe so.  She never came back here afterwards.  She has been dead for ages, now.  But mother’s always rather mysterious about her.  That’s how I began, wasn’t it?  I know that she was very beautiful, and sometimes I think I can just remember her.  I must have been about four when she left here, because I’m rather more than four years older than Brenda.”

The thought of Anne at four was not less fascinating to me than the picture of her at fourteen.  I was jealous of all her twenty-three years of life.  I wanted to have an intimate knowledge of all her past being; of every least change and development that she had suffered since babyhood.

But I was to have no more confidences of that sort just then.  The child disappeared from her face and speech as quickly as it had come.  She appeared to be dreaming, again, as she continued almost without a pause,—­

“But it isn’t my mother I’m sorry for in this affair.  She’ll arrange herself.  I think she’ll be glad, in a way.  We all should if it weren’t for my father.  We’re so ruled by the Jervaises here.  And it’s worse than that.  Their—­their prestige sort of hangs over you everywhere.  It’s like being at the court of Louis Quatorze.  The estate is theirs and they are the estate.  Mother often says we are still feodal down here.  It seems to me sometimes that we’re little better than slaves.”

I smiled at the grotesqueness of the idea.  It was impossible to conceive Anne as a slave.

She was still gazing out of the window with that appearance of abstraction, but she was evidently aware of my smile, for she said,—­

“You think that’s absurd, do you?”

“In connection with you,” I replied.  “I can’t see you as any one’s slave.”

She gave me her attention again.  “No, I couldn’t be,” she threw at me with a hint of defiance; and before I had time to reply, continued, “I was angry with Arthur for coming back.  To go into service!  I almost quarrelled with mother over that.  She was so weak about it.  She hated his being so far away.  She didn’t seem to mind anything as long as she could get him home again.  But Arthur’s more like my father.  He’s got a strain of Jervaise-worship in him, somewhere.”

“A very strong strain, just now,” I suggested.

She laughed.  “Yes, he’s Brenda’s slave; always will be,” she said.  “But I don’t count her as a Jervaise.  She’s an insurgee like me—­against her own family.  She’d do anything to get away from them.”

“Well, she will now,” I said, “and your brother, too.”

That seemed to annoy her.  “It may sound easy enough to you,” she said, “but it’s going to be anything but easy.  You can’t possibly understand how difficult it’s going to be.”

“Can’t you tell me?” I asked.