She clambered on to the bed and cast herself upon her in an ecstasy of relief. “Mother! Mother!” Well, she had her half-hour and was sent away comforted. Laura was to enjoy herself—and be very good—and go on with her lessons—and be kind to Wilfred and James: and there should be letters, many letters, in a round hand that Laura could read all by herself. And soon, very soon, Mother would come and fetch her home—and so good-bye to Laura, her Laura, her own little girl—— That is how Laura went to live at Brackenhurst with Gran’papa Valentine. She got her letters, three of them, but no more, though that was only because there was a new postman! But though the twins followed her in a little while in white overalls and black sashes, and the weeks went by, and Laura grew daily more excited and impatient, her mother never came to fetch her home. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III If they had only told her that her mother was dead! Death, Laura understood. There had been Ben, the beloved mongrel who was poisoned, and Grandmamma, and birds, and once a kitten. Her mother had explained it all to her at the time. Remembering, she would still have had, in the shock, her mother to lean upon. And, especially to a child, death’s finality is its own anodyne. But nobody, with that anxious English substitution of euphemism for tact, ever used the bald word ‘death.’ Mother, she was told, was alive and well and happy. She was living in heaven with Jesus and Our Father. She knew everything that Laura did, and one day, if Laura were good, she would see her again. Conceive the effect on a homesick baby with a superfluity of imagination, and a knowledge of life that would have amused a London sparrow! It was simplicity itself to Laura. Mother might come at any moment, and she would come, of course, from the station, along the dusty high-road that swept past the end of the lane and that you could see from the window of the inviolate spareroom. Therefore, till her aunt, in desperation, locked the door and hid the key, neither persuasion, scolding, disgrace nor docked puddings, could, on rainy days, keep a mulish Laura from curling up in the forbidden window-seat to watch the distant strip with an air of expectancy that would have made that awaited mother’s heart ache. The fine days were a more doubtful good. True, boundaries were enlarged, and from the end of the lane a wider vista was under her observation, a white river on which black, far-away specks were for ever swimming boat-like into ken, to swell and lengthen and lighten, at last, into figures of men and women—women in tweedy skirts and blue ribbons and little straw hats, that were always Mother until they were near. What mad terrier-rushes that high-road saw, helter-skelter down the last hundred yards, and what drag-foot returns and hot tears blinked away.