You see, I can think of such extraordinarily nasty things to say about people I don't like.

But this little girl treated me as if I had been an older sister or a kind big brother, and--well, I found it rather touching.
"Jean Jardine is her funny little name.

She looks a mere child, but she tells me she is twenty-three and she has been head of the house since she was nineteen.
"It is really the strangest story.

The father, one Francis Jardine, was in the Indian Civil Service--pretty good at his job, I gather--and these three children, Jean and her two brothers, David and Jock, were brought up in this cottage--The Rigs it is called--by an old aunt of the father's, Great-aunt Alison.

The mother died when Jock was a baby, and after some years the father married again, suddenly and unpremeditatedly, a beautiful and almost friendless girl whom he met in London when home on leave.