patron, St. Andrew, it has the figures of St. Valentine and St. Edmund
on either side of the Apostle.

Within the house is a dining-room, a better furnished room for the
reception of important visitors, and a small den known as the "priest's
room," in which Val interviews members of his flock. Upstairs are
Val's study and my sitting-room, with our respective bed-chambers and a
spare one for a casual visitor. Kitchen offices and servants' quarters
are in a tiny special block.

Both chapel and house have been built by Val. I can recall his
pleading letters to Dad for help to raise a more worthy temple. The
Pater, with his characteristic caution, made it a condition of his help
that a new house should form part of the plan. If the old chapel was
as unworthy of its purpose as Val's descriptions painted it, the
dwelling must have been indeed poverty-stricken. From what I have
gleaned from the natives, both buildings must have surpassed in
meanness our wildest conceptions of them. But more upon that subject
later.

Any account of the chapel-house at Ardmuirland would be incomplete
without some reference to a personage who holds an important position
in the household, second only to that of the master of the house. This
is Penelope Spence, known to the world outside as "Mistress Spence,"
and to Val and myself as "Penny." She was our nurse long ago, and is
now the ruler of the domestic affairs of the chapel-house. A little,
round, white-haired, rosy-faced dumpling of a woman is Penny; an
Englishwoman, too, from the Midlands, where the letter H is reserved by
many persons of her social standing for the sake of special emphasis
only. I find by calculation that she first saw the light at least