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Zealand, and I was sent home when I was sis years old to an aunt in Devonshire. She was my father’s sister, and she brought me up and sent me to school, and when she died I found she was living on an annuity, and that there wasn’t any money at all, which was pretty fierce.”
    â€œNo other relations?”
    She gave a funny little gurgling laugh.
    â€œI’ve got a half-sister called Rigg. Sounds grim, doesn’t it?”
    â€œIs she grim?”
    â€œI should think so—I’ve never seen her. It sounds odd, but you see it’s like this. My mother married a man called Augustus Rigg when she was seventeen, and she had twins on her eighteenth birthday, and they called them John and Jane. And then Augustus took a toss in the hunting-field and died, and about a year later a French artist called Pierre Levaux came along and married my mother and took her away to France. She left the twins with the Rigg relations, and two years later she was a widow again with a French baby called Perrine, and she left it with Monsieur Levaux’s mother and married my father and went out to New Zealand.”
    â€œThen you’ve got two sisters and a brother?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œNo—the John twin was killed in the war like my two real brothers. And Perrine’s dead too, a long time ago, but Jane’s alive. She wrote when old Aunt Emily died about eight months ago.”
    â€œBut you’ve never seen her?”
    Shirley shook her head. Her eyes sparkled.
    â€œIt wasn’t the sort of letter that makes you want to rush into the arms of the person who wrote it. She must be thirty years older than I am, and I thought she was most horribly afraid I’d want to come and settle on her. It was a sort of ‘Shoo, fly!’ kind of letter, if you know what I mean. Of course I don’t suppose the Riggs liked my mother going off and leaving them like that, but Jane wrote a lot about not having a spare room in her cottage, and what a dull place Emshot was for a young girl, and all that sort of thing.”
    â€œEmshot?” said Anthony. “That’s funny.”
    â€œWhy is it funny?”
    â€œBecause I’m week-ending at Emshot House. Shall I go and call on your sister Jane?”
    â€œYou can if you like. Oh, Anthony, do ! And then you can tell me what she’s like. Acacia Cottage, The Green, Emshot—that’s her address. Be an angel pioneer and find out just how grim she is!”
    â€œPerhaps she isn’t grim at all.”
    â€œSure to be. I’ve always meant to go and see her some day, but whenever I’ve felt brave enough I haven’t had the money, and whenever I’ve had the money I haven’t felt nearly brave enough.”
    â€œI think you ought to go and see her.”
    â€œâ€™M—” said Shirley. Her eyes sparkled again. “Do you know, Anthony, it’s about forty-six years since my father and mother went out to New Zealand, and I wasn’t born or thought of for another twenty-six years, and Jane’s been going all that time and a good bit longer. You can’t really bridge over a gap like that—can you?”
    â€œIt’s a bit difficult. Is there no one on your father’s side?”
    â€œOnly the aunt who brought me up. She was awfully old too. My father would be eighty if he was alive, and she was five years older. I’m not really in my right generation. I ought to have been a grand-daughter—I might have been one quite easily. Hugh was twenty-three when he was killed in 1914, and Ambrose was twenty-two. They were my brothers, but they ought to have been uncles or something like that really.” The colour ran up bright and clear into her cheeks, and she jumped down from the arm of the chair. “I’m talking the most frightful nonsense, but you led me on. Anthony, the oddest thing happened to me yesterday. I’d like to tell you about it.”
    She knelt