Elspeth Gifford was five years old when she went to live at Kirklands. Her father, an army officer, died in her babyhood, and her mother a few years later. The uncle and aunts in Scotland, all three much her mother’s seniors, were the child’s nearest relatives. To such a little girl death had meant no more than a bewildered loneliness, but the bewilderment was so sharp, the loneliness so aching, that she cried herself into an illness. She had seen her dead mother, the sweet, sightless, silent face, familiar yet amazing, and more than any fear or shrinking had been the suffocating mystery of feeling herself forgotten and left behind. Her uncle Nigel, sorrowful and grave, but so large and kin…
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