When Sophia was ten, the three children were handed over to a governess.

She did not stay very long; and neither did the nine other governesses who took her place between Sophia’s eleventh and thirteenth birthdays.

They had a habit of departing in a hurry at the end of a few months, either in tears and very insulted about something and glad to be going, or else in tears and darkly hinting at an undying devotion to somebody and begging to be allowed to stay.

It was Sophia who discovered that her father made love to the governesses. She saw him kneeling at the feet of Miss Leadlay, through the sitting room window which opened on to the back garden. He looked very handsome, and he was evidently pleading with Miss Leadlay to kiss him or something.

Sophia was much shocked. Reluctantly she conveyed the information, decently veiled in hints, to Harry and Francis. They were not very much interested, but they were rather jealous of Sophia because she had seen their father, so to speak, in action, and they had not. Apart from this passing regret they found the situation amusing.

Sophia did not. She knew that it made her mother very unhappy, and when each new governess came she would ask in her prayers, which Mrs Garden had taught her, that the governess might stay and everything might be all right.

But it never was. Of course some of the governesses stayed longer than others; Miss Strudwick, who was plain, good and kind, stayed for nearly a year, but in the end she went too, in tears, because Dr Garden told her that the children had learnt all that she could teach them. In truth, she left because Dr Garden did not want to teach her anything.

Then came Miss Vereker. Her departure resulted in the children being sent, at last, to school.

Miss Vereker tried to kill herself one quiet sunny afternoon, because Dr Garden had become bored by their intrigue.

He was out on his rounds, the little boys had gone for a walk on the Heath with their mother, and Sophia, who was at this time thirteen years old, was sitting on the landing which led up to the attics, reading Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Miss Vereker crept sobbing out of her bedroom and down to the dispensary, where she took enough veronal, she hoped, to kill herself.

Sophia, who had observed the sobbing and creeping with much disgust from her perch on the stairs, found her an hour later on the sitting room floor, unconscious. It was Sophia who fetched the cook and the parlourmaid and suggested that they should carry Miss Vereker upstairs to her bedroom.

Sophia and the two servants knew exactly what had happened and none of them felt sorry for Miss Vereker. The servants thought that my lady had been asking for trouble and had got it, and Sophia thought that Miss Vereker, of whom she had been rather fond at first, was a silly tiresome nuisance and that it would be rather a good thing if she died. But she never forgot the picture that the two servants made, slowly climbing the stairs with the big, unconscious girl swinging between them.