Nine-year-old Virginia waited, all that terrible day, and part of the night, for the return of the motoring party. Old Brand, the butler, who had been with the Mynors from the time of her father's boyhood, and who had begged his mistress not to leave this nurse in charge of the children, sat hour after hour with Virginia on his lap, until, at ten o'clock, he carried her up to bed, left her in charge of the under-nurse, and himself went out with one or two gardeners to see if he could hear news of the motor-party. Virginia, though in bed, could not sleep. She lay listening, listening for a sound in the silent house, until the dawn began to break. Then she heard wheels--wheels and voices on the gravel of the drive; and, slipping from her bed, without arousing the fast-sleeping nursemaid or Tony, she ran downstairs in her white nightie. All her life she would remember Brand's face as he strode into the hall and laid down upon a settle the burden that he carried--Bernard, with his head all shrouded in white linen. Then came a doctor, stern and tight-lipped, with the moaning baby in his arms. Virginia could still recall the carbolic smell of the doctor's clothes as he went upstairs, the blueness of the baby's face in its waxen stillness, and the silence punctuated by faint moans. The grim realities of life came then to the girl's consciousness for the first time, never to leave her more. For some years--until she went to the school at which she met Miriam Rosenberg--she was grave and silent with a gravity unbefitting her years, her fine health, her promising future. After that she yielded to the spell of youth and friendship and adventure, and the world had seemed ever more alluring, until the final shock of her father's loss. This hot afternoon, gazing down upon Pansy's pathetic fragility, she thought what sorrows had been hers in the twenty years of her short life. The future looked sadder than usual, and her customary good cheer was temporarily absent; she felt a curious depression, or sense of coming trouble. "You look so grave, Virgie darling!" "Pansy, I'm a perfect pig. I believe I am suffering from that horrible feeling we used to call 'after-the-party' feeling." "I don't wonder," replied Pansy sagely. "It must be pretty rotten to come back from all that fun and luxury and money to start being maid of all work again. Oh, Virgie, what are we to do?" "Do? Why, get on, of course--do our work and enjoy it!" cried Virginia, springing up and going to the window. "Oh, Pansy, the delphiniums! How this hot weather has brought them out! There was not one in bloom when I left." "I thought you'd be pleased with that!" cried the child in eager delight. "And look at the roses too, Virgie--the Hiawatha that you thought was dead!"