aid I.

Grandmamma shook her head.

'Not in London. Their carriages and horses are in the country still for
Mrs. Vandeleur. They will not be sent back to London till she comes.'

'I hope that won't be for a good long while,' I said to myself, rather
unfeelingly, for I might have remembered that as soon as my cousin's
wife was well enough she was to return. So her staying away long would
mean her not getting well.

Their being away--for Mr. Vandeleur was not in London himself just
then--was the part that pleased me the most of the whole plan. I thought
it would be great fun to be alone in London with grandmamma, and I had
been making lists of the things I wanted her to do and the places we
should go to see. It never struck me that she could have any one or
anything to think of but me myself!

CHAPTER X

NO. 29 CHICHESTER SQUARE

It was quite dark when we arrived at Paddington Station, and long before
then, as grandmamma had prophesied, I had had much more than enough of
the railway journey at first so pleasant.

I was tired and sleepy. It all seemed very, very strange and confusing
to me--the huge railway station, the dimly burning gas-lamps, the
bustle, the lots of people. For, as I have to keep reminding you, there
is scarcely ever nowadays a child who leads so quiet and unchangeful a
life as mine had been. I felt in a dream. If I had been less tired in my
body I daresay my mind and fancy would have been amused and excited by
it all. As it was, I just clung to grandmamma stupidly, wondering how
she kept her head, wondering still more, when I heard her suddenly
talking to some one--who turned out to be Mr. Vandeleur's footman--how
in the world she or he, or both of them, had managed to find each other
out in the crowd!

I did not speak. After a while I remember finding myself, and granny of
course, safe in a four-wheeler, which seemed narrow and stuffy compared
to the Middlemoor flys, and jolted along with a terrible rattle and
noise, so that I could scarcely distinguish the words grandmamma said
when once or twice she spoke to me. I daresay a good deal of the noise
was outside the cab, and some of it perhaps inside my own head, for it
did not altogether stop even when _we_ did--that is to say when we drew
up at 29 Chichester Square.

The house was very large--the hall looked to me almost as large as the
hall at Moor Court. It was not really so, but I could scarcely judge of
anything correctly that