“It is an extraordinary thing, but almost the very minute you left Priorsford things began to happen.

“I told you in the note I wrote the day you left that Bella Bathgate’s lodger had arrived and that I had seen her, but I didn’t realise then what a difference her coming would make to us.  I never knew such a friendly person; she comes in at any sort of time—­after breakfast, a few minutes before luncheon, for tea, between nine and ten at night.  Did I tell you her name is Pamela Reston, and her brother, who seems to be ranging about India somewhere, is Lord Bidborough (’A lord-no-less,’ as Mrs. M’Cosh would say).  She calls him Biddy, and seems devoted to him.

“Although she is horribly rich and an ‘honourable,’ and all that sort of thing, she isn’t in the least grand.  She never impresses one with her opulence as, for instance, Mrs. Duff-Whalley does.  Her clothes are beautiful, but so much a part of her personality that you never think of them.  Her pearls don’t hit you in the face as most other people’s do.  Because she is so unconscious of them, I suppose.  I think she is lovely.  Jock says she is like a greyhound, and I know what he means—­it is the long, swift, graceful way she has of moving.  She says she is forty.  I always thought forty was quite old, but now it seems to me the very prettiest age.  Age doesn’t really matter at all to people who have got faces and figures and manners like Pamela Reston.  They will always make whatever age they are seem the perfect age.

“I do wonder what brings her to Priorsford!  I rather think that having been all her life so very ‘twopence coloured’ she wants the ’penny plain’ for a change.  Perhaps that is why she likes The Rigs and us.  There is no mistake about our ’penny-plainness’—­it jumps to the eye!

“I am just afraid she won’t stay very long.  There are so many pretty little houses in Priorsford, and so many kind and forthcoming landladies, it was bad luck that she should choose Hillview and Bella Bathgate.  Bella is almost like a stage-caricature of a Scotswoman, so dour she is and uncompromising and she positively glories in the drab ugliness of her rooms.  Ugliness means to Bella respectability; any attempt at adornment is ‘daft-like.’

“Pamela (she has asked me to call her that) trembles before her, and that makes Bella worse.  She wants someone to stand up to her, to laugh at her grimness; she simply thinks when Pamela is charming to her that she is a poor creature.

“She is charming to everyone, this lodger of Bella’s.  Jock and Mhor and Mrs. M’Cosh are all at her feet.  She brings us books and papers and chocolates and fruit, and makes us feel we are conferring the favour by accepting them.  She is a real charmer, for when she speaks to you she makes you feel that no one matters to her but just you yourself.  And she is simple (or at least appears to be); she hasn’t that Now-I-am-going-to-be-charming manner that is so difficult to bear.  It is such