She was waving a newspaper in her hands. “Look at this,” she cried. “The morning paper. You’re in it! You … on the front page.”

She went to the table and spread out the paper on the dust sheet which covered it.

I stared at it. “M.P.’s daughter missing. Foul play cannot be ruled out, say police.” Beneath the headlines I read: “Henrietta (Harriet), thirteen-year-old daughter of Sir Edward Delvaney, M.P. for the Lansella district of Cornwall, disappeared from her London home two days ago. It is feared that she may have been kidnaped and will be held to ransom.”

Gwennan drew herself onto the table and hugged her knees; her eyes were almost hidden, as they were when her face was creased with amusement.

She pointed at me. “Well, Miss Henrietta (Harriet) Delvaney, you have become important, haven’t you? They’re searching for you. All over London they’re searching. And nobody knows where you are except you and me!”

It was what I had wanted, I supposed; so I had, in a way, achieved my purpose.

I laughed with Gwennan. People were talking about me; the police were searching for me. It was a wonderful moment. But experience bad taught me that wonderful moments did not last. They would find me, and then what would happen? It wouldn’t always be a sunny day. Gwennan would not stay with me. Dusk would come and I should be alone on the island.I had decided to run away on the night of the ball my father was giving in his town house, which was in a quiet Westminster square about five minutes walk from the Houses of Parliament. He had always said that it was part of his parliamentary duties to entertain lavishly and constantly, and whether we were in Westminster or Cornwall there were always guests: dinner parties and balls in London, shooting parties and house parties in Cornwall. Being only thirteen, I was excluded from these affairs. My place was in my own room, from which I would emerge to peer over the banisters down into the hall and gaze on the splendor, or stand at my window and watch the occupants of the carriages as they stepped forth and passed under the red-and-white awning which was set up for the occasion.

Throughout the day the preparations had been going on; thick red carpet had been laid on the steps which led to the front door and along the stretch of pavement on which guests would step when alighting from their carriages; two young women from the florist had been busy all the afternoon putting flowers in vases, and plants in every alcove, cleverly arranging some of them to look as if they were growing out of the walls; leaves and flowers had been entwined in the banisters of the curved and gracious staircase up to the first floor, which was as far as the guests would go.

“It smells like a funeral,” I said to my governess, Miss James.

“Harriet,” she answered, “you are being ghoulish.” And she looked at me with that pained expression which I knew so well.

“But it does smell like a funeral,” I insisted.

“You are a morbid child!” she muttered and turned away.

Poor Miss James. She was thirty and a lady without means of support; and in order to live she must either many or be governess to people like me.

The library was to be the supper room, and the flower decorations there were magnificent. A marble pond had been erected in the center of the room, and in it gold and silver fishes swam, and on the surface water lilies floated. There were draperies of rich purple, the Tory color. In the front drawing room, which was furnished in white, gold and purple, there was a grand piano, for there would be music tonight played by a famous pianist.

I should be able to gaze down at the guests as they mounted the stairs, hoping that none of them would look up and see their host’s daughter, who would he no credit to him. I should be hoping for a glimpse of my father, for it was at such times that I saw a different man from the one I knew. Past fifty, for he had married late in life, he was tall and his dark hair was white at the temples; he had blue eyes which were rather startling in his dark face, and when they looked at me they reminded me of ice. When he was being the host or talking to his constituents or entertaining las guests, those eyes sparkled. He was noted for his wit and the brilliance of his speeches in the House; his remarks were constantly being quoted in the papers. He was rich; and this was why he could afford to be a Member of Parliament Politics was his life. He had a private income from investments, but his great fortune came from steel somewhere in the Midlands. We never mentioned it; he had little to do with it; but it was the great provider.

He was Member for a division of Cornwall, find that was why we had a house near Lansella; we went from London to Cornwall, for when Parliament was not sitting there was the constituency to be “nursed”; and for some strange reason, where my father was, there was I too, though we saw little of each other.

Our town house had a large entrance hall, and on the ground floor the library, dining room and servants’ quarters; on the first floor were two large drawing rooms and the studies; above that were three guest rooms, one of them occupied by William Lister, my father’s secretary, besides my own and my father’s bedroom. On the top floor there were about six servants’ bedrooms.

It was a beautiful Georgian house, and its finest feature, as far as I was concerned, was the staircase, which curled like a serpent from bottom to top of the house and enabled one to look down from the top floor to the hall. But to me it was a cold house. Our house in Cornwall was the same. Any house where he lived would be like that … cold and dead. How different was Menfreya Manor; vital and warm, that was a house where anything could happen, a house that you would always dream of when you were away and never want to leave—a real home.

The London house was elegantly furnished to suit the architecture; so the furniture was eighteenth century and there were few concessions to our Victorian Age. I was always astonished when I went into other houses and saw their ornate furniture and crowded rooms and compared them with our Chippendale and Hepplewhite.

I have forgotten the names of the servants; there were so many of them. I remember Miss James, of course, because she was my governess, and Mrs, Trant the housekeeper and Polden the butler. Those are all the names I can think of— except, of course, Fanny.

But Fanny was different. I didn’t think of her as a servant Fanny was security in a frightening world; when I was bewildered by my father’s coldness I turned to Fanny for explanations; she could not give them, but she could offer comfort; she it was who made me drink my milk and eat my rice puddings; she scolded me and fretted over me so that I did not miss a mother as much as I otherwise would have. She had a sharp face with deep-set, dreaming eyes, hair that was a shade of grayish-brown, and scraped up to a knot on the top of her head so tightly that it looked as though it hurt, a sallow skin and a thin figure; she was about thirty-five and barely five feet tall, and she had always looked the same to me since I was a baby and first aware of her. She spoke with the tongue of the London streets, and when I grew older and she surreptitiously introduced me to those streets, I grew to love them as I loved her.

She had come to the house soon after I was born to act as wet nurse. I don't think they had intended to keep her, but I was apparently a difficult child from the first weeks and I took a fancy to Fanny. So she stayed on as my nurse, and although she was resented by Mrs. Trant, Polden and the nanny-in-chief, Fanny did not care about that—and neither did I.

Fanny was a woman of contrasts. Her sharp, cockney tongue did not fit the dreamy eyes; the stories she told me of her past were a mixture of fantasy and all that was practical. She had been left at an orphanage by persons unknown. “Just by the statue of St. Francis feeding the birds. So they called me Frances—Fanny, for short—Frances Stone. You see, it was a stone statue.” She was not Frances Stone now, because she had married Billy Carter; we didn’t talk much about Billy Carter. He was lying at the bottom of the ocean, she told me once, and she would never see him more in this life. “What’s done’s done,” she would say briskly. “And best forgot.” There were times when she gave herself up to make-believe, and a favorite game of ours when I was six or seven had been telling stories about Fanny before she was left by the statue of St. Francis. She told the stories, and I urged her on. She had been born in a house as grand as ours, but had been stolen by gypsies. She was an heiress, and a wicked uncle left her at the orphanage after substituting a dead child in her father’s house. There were several versions, and they usually ended with: “And we shall never know, Miss Harriet, so drink up your milk, for it’s time you was abed.”

She talked to me about the orphanage too, of the bells which summoned the children to inadequate meals; I saw them clearly in their gingham pinafores, their hands mottled with cold and blotched with chilblains; I saw them bobbing curtsies to those in authority and learning how to be humble.

“But we learned how to read and write, too,” said Fanny, “which is more than some will ever learn.”

“She scarcely ever talked of her baby though; and when she did, she would clutch me to her and hold my head down so that I shouldn’t see her face. “It was a little girl; she lived only an hour. It was all I’d gone through over Billy.”

Billy was dead; the baby was dead. “And then,” said Fanny, “I come to you.”

She used to take me to St. James’s Park, and there we would feed the ducks or sit on the grass while I persuaded her to tell more versions of her early life. She introduced me to a London I had never known existed. It was a secret, she said; for it would never do for any of Them—the people at home—to know where she took me on our outings. We went to the markets, where the costers had their stalls; gripping me tightly by the hand, she would pull me along, as excited as I was by these people who screamed the virtues of their wares in raucous voices which I could not understand. I remember the shops with old clothes hanging outside— the queer, musty, unforgettable smell; the old women selling pins and buttons, whelks, gingerbread and cough drops. Once she bought me a baked potato, which seemed the most delicious food I had ever had until I tasted roasted chestnuts hot from the embers.