when the boxes
are standing corded and labelled in the hall, and some one is going to
fetch the fatal cab.

Dick had just gone the round of the house, bidding dreary farewells to
all the servants; an unpleasant ordeal which he would gladly have
dispensed with, if possible, and which did not serve to raise his
spirits.

Upstairs, in the bright nursery, he had found his old nurse sitting
sewing by the high wire fender. She was a stern, hard-featured old lady,
who had systematically slapped him through infancy into boyhood, and he
had had some stormy passages with her during the past few weeks; but she
softened now in the most unexpected manner as she said good-bye, and
told him he was a "pleasant, good-hearted young gentleman, after all,
though that aggravating and contrairy sometimes." And then she
predicted, with some of the rashness attaching to irresponsibility, that
he would be "the best boy this next term as ever was, and work hard at
all his lessons, and bring home a prize"--but all this unusual
gentleness only made the interview more difficult to come out of with
any credit for self-control.

Then downstairs, the cook had come up in her evening brown print and
clean collar, from her warm spice-scented kitchen, to remark cheerily
that "Lor bless his heart, what with all these telegrafts and things,
time flew so fast nowadays that they'd be having him back again before
they all knew where they were!" which had a certain spurious consolation
about it, until one saw that, after all, it put the case entirely from
her own standpoint.

After this Dick had parted from his elder sister Barbara and his young
brother Roly, and had arrived where we found him first, at the mat
outside the dining-room door, where he still lingered shivering in the
cold foggy hall.

Somehow, he could not bring himself to take the next step at once; he
knew pretty well what his father's feelings would be, and a parting is a
very unpleasant ceremony to one who feels that the regret is all on his
own side.

But it was no use putting it off any longer; he resolved at last to go
in and get it over, and opened the door accordingly. How warm and
comfortable the room looked--more comfortable than it had ever seemed to
him before, even on the first day of the holidays!

And his father would be sitting there in a quarter of an hour's time,
just as he was now, while he himself would be lumbering along to the
station through the dismal raw fog!