Something himself some day. Glory Quayle was an orphan, and her
grandfather was a poor country clergyman. Their poverty was sweet, but
there was gall in it, nevertheless. The little forced economies in dress,
the frocks that had to be turned, the bonnets that were beauties when
they were bought, but had to be worn until the changes of fashion made
them frights, and then the mysterious parcels of left-off clothing from
goodness knows where--how the independence of the girl's spirit rebelled
against such humiliations!

The blood of her mother was beginning to boil over, and the old-maid
_regime_, which had crushed the life out of the Frenchwoman, was
suffocating the Manx girl with its formalism. She was always forgetting
the meal times regulated by the sun, and she could sleep at any time and
keep awake until any hour. It tired her to sit demurely like a young
lady, and she had a trick of lying down on the floor. She often laughed
in order not to cry, but she would not even smile at a great lady's silly
story, and she did not care a jot about the birthdays of the royal
family. The old aunts loved her body and soul, but they often said,
"Whatever is going to happen to the girl when the grandfather is gone?"

And the grandfather--good man--would have laid down his life to save her
a pain in her toe, but he had not a notion of the stuff she was made of.
His hobby was the study of the runic crosses with which the Isle of Man
abounds, and when she helped him with his rubbings and his casts he was
as merry as an old sand-boy. Though they occupied the same house, and her
bedroom that faced the harbour was next to his little musty study that
looked over the scullery slates, he lived always in the tenth century and
she lived somewhere in the twentieth.

The imprisoned linnet was beating at the bars of its cage. Before she was