st of all, and generally he would do anything rather than
let his red eyes be seen; but to-day he didn't care, we were too full of
being sorry to care whether people noticed our eyes or not. And at last
when papa had kissed us all three once more for the very last time,
reaching up to the railway-carriage window, and the boys and I holding
him so tight that he was nearly choked; at last it was all over, all the
last tiny endings of good-byes over, and we three were--it seemed to us
as far as we could understand it in our childish way--alone in the
world.

There was no one else in the railway-carriage--Pierson of course was
with us--she had put off being married for two months, so that she could
see us settled and get the new nurse into our ways, as she called it;
she too had been crying, so that she was quite a fright, for her nose
was all bumpy-looking with the way she had been scrubbing at it and her
eyes. She was very kind to us; she took Racey on her knee, and let Tom
and me sit close up to her; and if she had had three arms she would have
put one round each of us I am sure.

"Poor dears!" she said, and then she looked so very sad herself that Tom
and Racey took to comforting _her_, instead of expecting her to comfort
them. I _was_ sad really--three poor little things like us going away
like that; away from everything we had ever known, away from our nice
bright nursery, where everything a mother could do to make children
happy our mother had done; away from our dear little cots, where mother
used to kiss us every night; and our little gardens where we had worked
so happily in the summer; away to great big London, where among the
thousand faces in the street there was not one we had ever seen before,
where other little boys and girls had their fathers and mothers, while
ours were going far, far away, to strange countries where they would
find no little boys and girls like their own, no Audrey and Tom and
Racey.

I thought of all this in a half-stupid way, while I sat in the
railway-carriage with my arm round Tom's neck and my head leaning on
Pierson's shoulder. We had never cared _very_ much about Pierson, but
now that she was the only thing left to us, we began to cling to her
very much.

"I am so glad you've not gone away, Pierson," I said, and Pierson seemed
very pleased, for I didn't very often say things like that.

"Poor dear Miss Audrey," she said in return. "Poor dear," seemed the
only words she could