“Oh, we shan’t have to wait for that!” she cried, with a burst of her native energy. “Dear Aubrey, they are coming back; you must go away.” “Till we meet again, darling?” “Till we meet again!” CHAPTER XII. Bee stole into her mother’s room as she went upstairs before that first dinner at home which used to be such a joyous meal. How they had all enjoyed it--until now. The ease and space, the going from room to room, the delight in finding everything with which they were familiar, the flowers in the vases (never were any such flowers as those at home!), the incursions of the little ones shouting to each other, “Mamma’s come home!” Even the little air of disorder which all these interruptions brought into the orderly house was delightful to the young people. They looked forward as to an ideal life, to beginning all their usual occupations again and doing them all better than ever. “Oh, how nice it is to be at home!” the girls had said to each other. Instead of those hotel rooms, which at their best are never more than hotel rooms, a _genre_ not to be mistaken, how delightful was the drawing-room at home, with all its corners--Bee’s little table where she muddled at her drawings, mamma’s great basket of needlework where everything could be thrown under charitable cover, Betty’s stool on which she sat at the feet of her oracle of the moment, whoever that might be, and all the little duties to be resumed--the evening papers arranged for papa (as if he had not seen enough of them in the daytime in his office!), the flowers to see after, the little notes to write, all the pleasant common-places of the home life. But to-night, for the first time, dinner was a silent meal, hurried over--not much better than a dinner at a railway station, with a sensation in it of being still on the road, of not having yet reached their destination. The drawing-room was in brown holland still, for they were all going on to Kingswarden to-morrow. The house felt formal, uninhabited, as if they had come home to lodgings. All this was bad enough; but the primary trouble of all was the fact that mamma was upstairs--gone to bed before dinner, too tired to sit up. Such a thing had never happened before. However tired she was, she had always so brightened up at the sensation of coming home.