Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/20



was a schoolgirl when the war began, and she was a schoolgirl when it ended. So was her cousin Lucilla. Explanations are tiresome, but inevitable. Even on the stage people draw their chairs together, and one tells the other—for your benefit—what both of them must know perfectly well, beginning, probably: "It was just such a stormy night as this, twenty years ago, my dear wife, when that mysterious stranger…" or "I often think of the secret marriage of the Duchess, when you and I—I her butler and you her maid—were sworn by Her Grace to eternal secrecy. The circumstances, you will remember, are these…" And then he tells you all about it. As I will now tell you. So let us face the explanations, which are really short and simple.

Jane Quested's father, who was also Lucilla's uncle, was in India. He had nothing but his pay, which he found insufficient. A great aunt had left Jane quite a pleasant little fortune—nothing dazzling, but enough to keep the wolf from the door of a reasonably prosperous home. This little fortune, in charge of a trustee, a solicitor, was tied up and secured by all those arts and crafts which lawyers could devise and execute to protect it from impecunious fathers. It was to be Jane's when she reached the age of reason as defined by law. To Lucilla the same relative had left the same competence.

When war broke out the cousins were at school in Devonshire, and to both father and trustee it seemed desirable that they should stay there for the duration of the war. The father had no wish that his daughter should undertake a