For Mother had only gone away to get better! She was ill, because she had begun to wear little white shawls, although it was summer-time, and sat still so much, and did not pour away Nurse’s medicines any more. So Laura saved her sugar at tea-time for her mother, to take the taste away. There was a day when Mother cried. Laura had never known till then that mothers could cry. She held her head and tried to be grown-up and comforting, but she was secretly terrified, yet a little important too, because Mother would not let any one be called, but lay quiet against Laura’s shoulder, just as Laura had so often lain against hers. The next day, or week, or months, she could never remember how long it was, her lazy mother had breakfast in bed, and she was to be sent away to stay with Gran’papa Valentine. The twins were to be left behind. “Too young to understand,” said Nurse significantly to the parlour-maid. Understand what? She coaxed, implored, stormed, for an explanation. Why shouldn’t she stay, if the twins did? She had not been naughty—she had been good, good! Mother wanted her. Mother couldn’t want the twins without her. Mother always wanted her. And she wanted her mother—she wanted her mother—— She fought like a little wild cat while they dressed her, in a fit of passionate anger that shook her small body as wind shakes a bush, and that only her mother had ever been able to control. There was a wildness about it that startled even the stolid nurse, who could not guess at the foreboding, the desperation that underlay the paroxysm, and was, of course, as incomprehensible to the child herself as his own despair to the dog who watches you pack your trunk. It was the friendly parlour-maid who came to the rescue with her cheerful—— “Now, Miss Laura, you won’t be let say good-bye to your ma if you can’t be good!” That quieted her, banished the unreasoning fear that had been upon her of the hateful strength of her nurse’s arms, that at any peremptory moment might seize and bear her, struggling, helpless, into the wilderness where Mother was not. She would not, could not, go without a word from her mother, or a promise or a kiss.... But if she might say good-bye—why, the world had righted itself again!... Mother would make all clear.... Mother would make all right.... Could she go to Mother now? this directly minute? She submitted herself to the maid (she would not go near the nurse) and was re-arranged and smoothed and tidied, and left at last at the bedroom door, with a final injunction to be a good girl, and very quiet, and not stay long. She shook off the maid’s hand, and, awed a little in spite of herself, slipped into the room. She was so small that the foot of the big bedstead blocked her vision like a wall, and for a blank moment she thought the room empty. Then the clothes rustled faintly, and emboldened she peeped round the post. There, sure enough, lay her mother, her beautiful long plaits disordered, an arm flung out weakly.