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It had lain tenantless for two years, when one spring morning Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank Bracy arrived and took possession. They came (for aught we knew) out of nowhere; but they brought a good many boxes, six cats, and a complete set of new muslin blinds. On their way they purchased a quart of fresh milk, and Mr. Frank fed the cats while Miss Bracy put up the blinds. In the afternoon a long van arrived with a load of furniture; and we children who had gathered to watch were rewarded by a sensation when the van started by disgorging an artist’s lay-figure, followed by a suit of armour. From these to a mahogany chest of drawers with brass handles was a sad drop, and we never regained the high romance of those first few minutes; but the furniture was undeniably handsome, and when Miss Bracy stepped out and offered us sixpence apiece to go and annoy somebody else, we came away convinced that our visitors were persons of exceptionally high rank. It puzzled us afterwards that, though a bargain is a bargain, not one of us had stayed to claim his sixpence.

The newcomers brought no servants; but after a week there arrived (also out of nowhere) an elderly and taciturn cook. Also, Miss Bracy on the third morning walked up to the farm at the head of the valley and hired down the hind’s second daughter for a “help.” We knew this girl, Lizzie Truscott, and waylaid her on her homeward road that evening for information. She told us that Miss Bracy’s cats had a cradle apiece lined with muslin over pink calico; that the window curtains inside reached from the ceilings to the floors; that the number of knives and forks was something cruel–one kind for fish, another for meat, and a third for fruit; that in one of the looking-glasses a body could see herself at one time from head to feet, though why you should want a looking-glass to see your feet in when you could see them without was more than she knew; and, finally, that Miss Bracy had strictly forbidden her to carry tales–a behest which, convinced that Miss Bracy had dealings with the Evil One, she meant to observe. The elderly cook when she arrived warned us away from the door with a dialect we did not recognise. Her name (Lizzie reported) was Deborah, and in our haste we set her down for a Jewess; but I seem to have detected her accent since, and a few of her pet phrases, in the pages of Scottish fiction.

This is all I can tell–so fitful are childish memories–of the coming of Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank. I cannot say, for instance, what gossip it bred, or how soon they wore down the edge of it and became, with their eccentricities, an accepted feature of the spot they had made their home. They made no friends, no acquaintances: everyone knew of Miss Bracy’s cats, but few had seen them. Miss Bracy herself was on view in church every Sunday morning, when Mr. Frank walked with her as far as the porch. He never entered the building, but took a country walk during service, returning in time to meet her at the porch and escort her home. His other walks he took alone, and almost always at night. The policeman tramping towards Four Turnings after midnight to report to the country patrol would meet him and pause for a minute’s chat. Night-wandering beasts–foxes and owls and hedgehogs–knew his footstep and unlearned their first fear of it. Sometimes, but not often, you might surprise him of an afternoon seated before an easel in some out-of-the-way corner of the cliffs; but if you paused then to look, he too paused and seemed inclined to smudge out his work. The Vicar put it about that Mr. Frank had formerly been a painter of fame, and (being an astute man) one day decoyed him into his library, where hung an engraving of a picture “Amos Barton” by one F. Bracy. It had made a small sensation at Burlington House a dozen years before; and the Vicar liked it for the pathos of its subject–an elderly clergyman beside his wife’s deathbed. To him the picture itself could have told little more than this engraving, which utterly failed to suggest the wonderful colour and careful work the artist (a young man with a theory and enthusiasm to back it) had lavished on the worn carpet and valances of the bed, as well as on the chestnut hair of the dying woman glorified in the red light of sunset.