u. So
the children were left in the care of old Nurse, who lived in Fitzroy
Street, near the British Museum, and though she was always very kind to
them, and indeed spoiled them far more than would be good for the most
grown-up of us, the four children felt perfectly wretched, and when
the cab had driven off with Father and all his boxes and guns and the
sheepskin, with blankets and the aluminium mess-kit inside it, the
stoutest heart quailed, and the girls broke down altogether, and sobbed
in each other's arms, while the boys each looked out of one of the long
gloomy windows of the parlour, and tried to pretend that no boy would be
such a muff as to cry.

I hope you notice that they were not cowardly enough to cry till their
Father had gone; they knew he had quite enough to upset him without
that. But when he was gone everyone felt as if it had been trying not to
cry all its life, and that it must cry now, if it died for it. So they
cried.

Tea--with shrimps and watercress--cheered them a little. The watercress
was arranged in a hedge round a fat glass salt-cellar, a tasteful device
they had never seen before. But it was not a cheerful meal.

After tea Anthea went up to the room that had been Father's, and when
she saw how dreadfully he wasn't there, and remembered how every minute
was taking him further and further from her, and nearer and nearer to
the guns of the Russians, she cried a little more. Then she thought of
Mother, ill and alone, and perhaps at that very moment wanting a little
girl to put eau-de-cologne on her head, and make her sudden cups of tea,
and she cried more than ever. And then she remembered what Mother had
said, the night before she went away, about Anthea being the eldest
girl, and about trying to make the others happy, and things like that.
So she stopped crying, and thought instead. And when she had thought as
long as she could bear she washed her face and combed her hair, and went
down to the others, trying her best to look as though crying were an
exercise she had never even heard of.

She found the parlour in deepest gloom, hardly relieved at all by
the efforts of Robert, who, to make the time pass, was pulling Jane's
hair--not hard, but just enough to tease.

'Look here,' said Anthea. 'Let's have a palaver.' This word dated from
the awful day when Cyril had carelessly wished that there were Red
Indians in England--and there had been. The word brought back memories
of last summer ho