"Run, dear, I must not keep you any longer. I am so comfortable now, with everything put right." "Good-bye then for the time," said Irene, smiling back brightly as she stood at the door. "Good-bye, little nurse. Try to enjoy yourself, dear; and thank you for all you have done for me." But, though she was so comfortable and 'had everything she wanted,' Mrs. Carlyle did not fall asleep for a long while after the girls had left her, but lay gazing thoughtfully before her, and more than once tears shone in her eyes and fell on to her pillow. "They are such darlings, too," she murmured at last, rousing herself with a little shake, as though trying to shake off her thoughts. "They are such dear children, it is wicked to wish them other than they are, yet sympathy is very sweet; and--and understanding makes life very, very pleasant." CHAPTER IX. "Debby! Tom! Are you ready? It is time to start." Dead silence. "Audrey, ask Mary if she knows where they are, will you, please?" Audrey walked away reluctantly. The whole party had collected just where they could look right into the kitchen directly the door was open; and one of the last things Audrey wanted, under the circumstances, was to open the door, for she knew, only too well, the state the kitchen was in. Instead of being neat and spotless, a place of gleaming copper and silvery shining steel, of snowy wood and polished china, such as she would have loved to display, it was all a hopeless muddle and confusion, a regular 'Troy Town' of a kitchen. Perhaps she hoped she could make Mary hear without actually opening the door; but it was a forlorn hope. Mary was generally afflicted with deep deafness if one particularly wanted her hearing to be acute. She was now. Audrey called again and again in vain. "Open the door," suggested Mr. Carlyle, "she is probably rattling pans and dishes and can't hear anything beyond." "Put your head in and shout," suggested Faith, and Daphne and Keith laughed. Audrey had to do it. She knew that if she did not Faith would--and when Faith opened a door--well, all there was to see one saw. In a gust of anger she turned the handle and opened the door as little as she could. Oh how she longed for one of the exquisitely neat Dutch kitchens so often seen in pictures. "Mary!" she called in impatiently, "wherever are you? Do you know what has become of the children?" Mary heard at last, and hurrying forward to reply, spread the door as hospitably wide as it would go, and stood outlined against a background of dirty pots and pans, a table piled with unwashed dishes, and a litter of torn paper everywhere. She had been so busy packing the baskets for tea that her own work had got more behind than usual. "I saw them going out of the garden carrying a basket each," she said slowly, eyeing the while with the keenest interest the visitors whom she now saw for the first time. "I thought you had sent them on ahead, perhaps, Miss Audrey."