tricks and troubles. Then there was that long talk with grandmamma, and
afterwards with Bobby, in her room. When Lottie and I found ourselves
alone together just at bed-time, how much we had to say! It seemed to me
a little difficult to talk over all her affairs, though when, after some
time, she called upon me to admire my two tall cousins, I was quite
ready to do so. Yet my own rosy, round-faced, romping schoolboy brother
was much more in my thoughts now.

I don't think I had ever known till now that my mother was grandmamma's
eldest child, so it had never struck me that, now that dear uncle was
gone, Bobby, and not Harry, would be master of Beecham Park! How strange
it did seem! I thought of the funny boy's blushing awkwardness when
grandmamma had told him, and then of his confession to me that "it was a
horrid bore, he had so meant to be a discoverer, and get lost in Africa
like Dr. Livingstone; and now, he supposed, he couldn't!" And just
before I went to sleep that night I thought of his last words about it a
few hours ago, as he threw his strong arm over my shoulder:--

"I say, Sis, it'll be ever so long first--that's one comfort!--but if
ever I do have to come and live here, you'll come too, won't you? Then
you can see after it all, you know, and then it won't be quite so bad!"

Should I? Would Beecham ever be my real home? And Jane--Jane down at the
Lodge with her three rosy, tidy little daughters. Wasn't this just what
she said years ago when she first brought me to Beecham? "What if Master
Bobby should grow up some day to find it all his own, and he the lord of
it all!"

So it had come to pass, and Beecham, dear beautiful Beecham, was to be
really _ours_!