r two previous attacks of an illness which seemed
to prostrate her for a short period, and as she soon regained her
ordinary health, I did not think they could be of a serious nature.

So I devoted my holiday cheerfully enough to the illumination of a
text, on the gaudy colouring of which I found myself gazing two days
later with a dull wonder, as at the work of a strange hand in a long
dead past, for the boy who had painted that was a happy boy who had a
mother, and for two endless days I had been alone.

Those days, and many that followed, come back to me now but vaguely. I
passed them mostly in a state of blank bewilderment caused by the double
sense of sameness and strangeness in everything around me; then there
were times when this gave way to a passionate anguish which refused all
attempts at comfort, and times even--but very, very seldom--when I
almost forgot what had happened to me.

Our one servant remained in the house with me, and a friend and
neighbour of my mother's was constant in her endeavours to relieve my
loneliness; but I was impatient of them, I fear, and chiefly anxious to
be left alone to indulge my melancholy unchecked.

I remember how, as autumn began, and leaf after leaf fluttered down from
the trees in our little garden, I watched them fall with a heavier
heart, for they had known my mother, and now they, too, were deserting
me.

This morbid state of mind had lasted quite long enough when my uncle,
who was my guardian, saw fit to put a summary end to it by sending me
to school forthwith; he would have softened the change for me by taking
me to his own home first, but there was illness of some sort there, and
this was out of the question.

I was neither sorry nor glad when I heard of it, for all places were the
same to me just then; only, as the time drew near, I began to regard the
future with a growing dread.

The school was at some distance from London, and my uncle took me down
by rail; but the only fact I remember connected with the journey is that
there was a boy in the carriage with us who cracked walnuts all the way,
and I wondered if he was going to school too, and concluded that he was
not, or he would hardly eat quite so many walnuts.

Later we were passing through some wrought-iron gates, and down an
avenue of young chestnuts, which made a gorgeous autumn canopy of
scarlet, amber, and orange, up to a fine old red-brick house, with a
high-pitched roof, and a cupola in which a