CHAPTER I

When Uncle Thomas Scarterfield died and left his niece, Marilla Vandale, eleven thousand dollars, Marilla was second governess in Miss Dellaby’s school for young ladies at Dulwich. She was then twenty-two years of age, and up to that time her life had been about as uniformly grey as the coating of a modern battleship. Indeed, between Marilla and such a vessel there was a striking similarity; she had been a unit, on duty against possible enemy forces for ten years, and if nothing had ever come to open battle, it was…