ne!
It's nicer than anybody else's in the whole form."

"Then you'll score over Daisy for once!"

"Rather! Lorraine, you're a trump! Oh, and the ducky little blue knife
inside, and pink pencils! I know everybody'll want to borrow them at
once, but I shan't lend them to a single soul! They're too nice even to
use myself. _Do_ say I'm not to lend them, and then the girls needn't
call me stingy."

"All right! I absolutely forbid them to be lent. Where's Rosemary? I've
a parcel here that may interest her. No, Cuckoo! You're not to peep
inside. What a Paul Pry you are! Go and call her, and I'll show it to
her myself."

Somehow Lorraine felt as if the little visit to London had suddenly
added years to her age. It had enlarged her circle of experiences so
greatly that she had begun to look on life from almost a grown-up
standpoint. She had gone away, older certainly than Monica, but regarded
in the family category as one of "the children", and she had returned to
take her place on a level with Richard, Donald, Rodney, and Rosemary.
She was allowed to read Richard's letters from Mesopotamia, instead of
only having portions retailed to her; and she was not sent out of the
room now, when Father and Mother discussed Rodney's future for those
halcyon times when peace should be declared, and he should leave the Air
Force. She began in some measure to realize her mother's daily, hourly
anxiety about these boys at the front, and to understand how behind all
the happiness of her daily life stood a nightmare, with a spectral hand
raised ever ready to fall on those three best beloved.

Trouble, which mercifully spared their own family, struck nevertheless
very near. A yellow envelope arrived one day at the Barton Forresters'
house, and Aunt Carrie opened it with trembling fingers and a sinking
heart.

"There's no answer!" she said briefly to the waiting telegraph girl.
Then she sat down and tried to face what the short message from the War
Office really conveyed. Only twelve words, but it meant the hope of a
family trailed in the dust. Lindon, their one treasured boy, had "gone
west". Well, other mothers had given their dearest and best! She would
offer him gladly, joyfully, on the altar of Britain's glory! But her
face seemed to grow suddenly shrunken, and the high colour faded from
her cheeks, leaving a network of little red veins instead.

"If only she wouldn't try to be _quite_ so brave about it!" said Mrs.
George Forrester.