He had recently achieved his fourth birthday and the garden, which was his out-door nursery, was a-flutter with tremulous spring-flowers. That night his mother sent away the nurse, and undressed and bathed him herself. She wanted to be foolish to her heart's content, laughing and singing and crying over him. Only the slender laburnum, with the kind old mulberry-tree peering over its shoulder, watched them through the window. The laburnum was a young girl, his mother told him, with shaky golden curls; the mulberry, whose arms were propped with crutches, was her grandfather. As Peter's mother squeezed the sponge down his back, she stooped her pretty head, kissing some new part of his wet little body as though she were making a discovery. And she called him love-words, Peterkins, Precious Lamb, Ownest; and she pushed him away from her, saying he did not belong to her, that so she might feel the eager arms clasped more fiercely about her neck. When he had been rolled in the towel, his big father entered and took him, rubbing his prickly chin against Peter's neck; nor would he give him up. It was a long time before he was popped into his pink, woolly nightgown. Even then, when he was safe in bed, they stayed by him--his mother humming softly, while his father knelt to be able to kiss her without bending. Shadows came out from the cupboard and crept toward the window, pushing back the daylight; the daylight dodged across the ceiling, hid in the mulberry where it slept till morning, came back and peeped in at him tenderly, and vanished. His eyes grew heavy; the next thing he remembers is an early breakfast, a cab at the door and being told to be the goodest little boy in the world. He was hugged till he was breathless; then he saw the face of his beautiful mother, her eyes red with weeping, leaning out of the cab-window throwing kisses, growing distant and yet more distant down the terrace. In later years he knew where they went--to Switzerland to re-live their honeymoon. At the time he thought they were gone forever. Grace, his nurse, did her best to comfort him, blowing his nose so severely that he looked to see if it had come off in the handkerchief. For Grace he had a great respect. She was a good-natured lump of a girl, who beat a drum for the Salvation Army under gas-lamps and fought a never ending battle with herself to pronounce her name correctly. Mr. Barrington had threatened that the penalty for failing was dismissal. Now the violence of her emotion and the absence of her employers made her reckless. “There, little Round Tummy, Grice'll taik care of you, don't you blow bubbles like that. You'll cry yourself dry, that you will, and drown us.” An awful suggestion! He pictured the dining-room flooded with his tears, the furniture floating and Grace swimming for her life. He turned off the tap to just the littlest dribble. If he'd stopped at once, Grace would have ceased to be sorry.