n I opened my window, I had heard the cuckoo, and could
tell that he was calling from just about Mary's Meadow.

I cried my eyes into such a state, that I was obliged to turn my
attention to making them fit to be seen; and I had spent quite
half-an-hour in bathing them and breathing on my handkerchief, and
dabbing them, which is more soothing, when I heard Mother calling me.
I winked hard, drew a few long breaths, rubbed my cheeks, which were
so white they showed up my red eyes, and ran down-stairs. Mother was
coming to meet me. She said--"Where is Christopher?"

It startled me. I said, "He was with me in the garden, about--oh,
about an hour ago; have you lost him? I'll go and look for him."

And I snatched up a garden hat, which shaded my swollen eyelids, and
ran out. I could not find him anywhere, and becoming frightened, I
ran down the drive, calling him as I went, and through the gate, and
out into the road.

A few yards farther on I met him.

That child is most extraordinary. One minute he looks like a ghost; an
hour later his face is beaming with a radiance that seems absolutely
to fatten him under your eyes. That was how he looked just then as he
came towards me, smiling in an effulgent sort of way, as if he were
the noonday sun--no less, and carrying a small nosegay in his hand.

When he came within hearing he boasted, as if he had been Caesar
himself--

"I went; I found it. I've got them."

And as he held his hand up, and waved the nosegay--I knew all. He had
been to Mary's Meadow, and the flowers between his fingers were
hose-in-hose.

CHAPTER XII.

"I won't be selfish, Mary," Christopher said. "You invented the game,
and you told me about them. You shall have them in water on your
dressing-table; they might get lost in the nursery. Bessy is always
throwing things out. To-morrow I shall go and look for galligaskins."

I was too glad to keep them from Bessy's observation, as well as her
unparalleled powers of destruction, which I knew well. I put them into
a slim glass on my table, and looked stupidly at them, and then out of
the window at Mary's Meadow.

So they had lived--and grown--and settled there--and were now in
bloom. _My_ plants.

Next morning I was sitting, drawing, in the school-room window, when I
saw the Old Squire coming up the drive. There is no mistaking him when
you can see him at all. He is a big, handsome old man, with white
whiskers, and a white hat, and white gaiter