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6 easily moved to pity, exceedingly loyal and loving to those she loved, seeing no virtues in those she disliked. Thus she had stormed her way up to her thirteen years, a problem to manage, except that she adored Mary so much that she could not long grieve her, and was so true and affectionate that she was sure to come out right in the end.

Young as they were, the Garden girls were three distinct types, each beautiful. Mary least could claim actual beauty, perhaps, yet she was the loveliest of the three. Jane and Florimel were creatures for an artist to rave over; Mary was the type that men and women and angels love. When Florimel was a year old their mother had left them. She was English, an artist of some sort, they knew, and she had elected to respond to the call of her art, and had gone to England, leaving her children to the more than efficient guardianship of the Garden relatives, their legally appointed guardian, Mr. Austin Moulton, their father’s friend, and the devotion of Anne Kennington, the housekeeper, nurse—everything. It would have been hard to define Anne Kennington’s position in the Garden household, as it would have been hard to do justice to the way she filled it.