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governess, how on earth did I find the time? And if I remember all of this, why can I not remember anything that matters?
    But that way lay the terror. It was a relief when Mrs. Mauleverer came tapping at the door. “Are you awake, Miss Lamb? John is returned with your box and I am simply dying to have it opened. Are you strong enough, do you think, to sit up and watch while Martha unpacks it for you?” And then, without waiting for an answer: “I call you Miss Lamb, for lack of a better name, for I am sure it is not your real one.”
    “No, indeed,” Marianne smiled. “I made it up on the spur of the moment for the vicar’s benefit. I had been thinking, you see, of Lady Caroline—” And then, with a sudden change of tone: “Oh, ma’am, why is it that I can remember all these absurdities, and yet nothing to the purpose?”
    “It is most provoking, I quite agree,” said Mrs. Mauleverer. “But never fret yourself, when Dr. Barton comes tomorrow, I am sure he will be able to explain it all. And in the meantime, who knows? Perhaps the sight of your things will bring back your memory.”
    The box was a heavy wooden one, plain, shabby, and, to Marianne’s bitter disappointment, without any name or label. There was no lock, and, at Mrs. Mauleverer’s command, the two footmen who had brought it untied the heavy cord around it before they withdrew.
    “There.” Mrs. Mauleverer turned eagerly to Martha. “Now begin. Oh, very well Gibbs, you may stay.”
    Martha was a thin, bright-eyed, middle-aging woman, rather birdlike in appearance, who treated her mistress, Marianne noticed, with much less respect than Gibbs did. She grumbled a good deal at being summoned away from the game she had been playing with Thomas, summing up Marianne, the while, with sharp, hostile eyes. Did she resent having to unpack for her? Or was it rather that she grudged her prior claim on Thomas about whom she spoke like a doting, dictatorial mamma?
    Still grumbling, she flung open the box and revealed a top layer of child’s clothes. Brightening at once: “Oh, good. I have been compelled to borrow for the poor child from the lodge keeper’s little boy, and I can tell you his clothes are not at all the thing. This is much better.” She shook out a white frilled shirt and a pair of nankeen trousers. “Yes, indeed, these are very much more like it. One thing is certain, ma’am, and that is that Thomas is no charity child: you can tell just to look at him that he’s well bo rn .” A quick glance for Marianne suggested that the same thing could hardly be said of her. Now she lifted out a plain brown stuff dress very like the one Marianne had been wearing when she arrived and laid it across a chair. It was badly crumpled, shabby and, Marianne thought, somehow pitiful. Hateful to have this strange and strangely hostile woman unpacking her things.
    But Martha went on lifting more clothes out of the box: a brown woollen spencer, two severe-looking flannel petticoats and two equally uncompromising nightgowns; some drab w orsted stockings, three caps and a pile of handkerchiefs. “Bah, these caps!” she sneered, trying one on, then picked up a handkerchief with a suddenly pulled expression: “The handkerchiefs are beautiful; quite out of keeping with the other things. Perhaps they were a present ...”
    Mrs. Mauleverer interrupted her: “For pity’s sake stop chattering, Martha, and get on with it. There must be some personal things surely?”
    “Well,” Martha went on doubtfully, “there is this.” She lifted out a shabby workbasket, and, at an eager exclamation from her, handed it to her mistress. But it proved to contain only the most basic necessities of housewifery: a few skeins of thread, needl e s, a pair of scissors, a heavy, old-fashioned thimble. A battered-looking leather writing case proved equally unrewarding. And the box was nearly empty. With an expression of weary superiority Martha took out a pair of heavy buckled shoes and