l Mrs. Fursey didn't understand. But I foresaw that
further explanation would only shock her, so contented myself with a
simple, matter-of-fact question.

"How do you get to London; do you have to die first?"

"I do think," said Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of resigned despair rather
than of surprise, "that, without exception, you are the silliest little
boy I ever came across. I've no patience with you."

"I am very sorry, nurse," I answered; "I thought--"

"Then," interrupted Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of many generations, "you
shouldn't think. London," continued the good dame, her experience no
doubt suggesting that the shortest road to peace would be through my
understanding of this matter, "is a big town, and you go there in a
train. Some time--soon now--your father will write to your mother that
everything is ready. Then you and your mother and your aunt will leave
this place and go to London, and I shall be rid of you."

"And shan't we come back here ever any more?"

"Never again."

"And I'll never play in the garden again, never go down to the
pebble-ridge to tea, or to Jacob's tower?"

"Never again." I think Mrs. Fursey took a pleasure in the phrase. It
sounded, as she said it, like something out of the prayer-book.

"And I'll never see Anna, or Tom Pinfold, or old Yeo, or Pincher, or
you, ever any more?" In this moment of the crumbling from under me of
all my footholds I would have clung even to that dry tuft, Mrs. Fursey
herself.

"Never any more. You'll go away and begin an entirely new life. And I do
hope, Master Paul," added Mrs. Fursey, piously, "it may be a better one.
That you will make up your mind to--"

But Mrs. Fursey's well-meant exhortations, whatever they may have been,
fell upon deaf ears. Here was I face to face with yet another problem.
This life into which I had fallen: it was understandable! One went away,
leaving the pleasant places that one knew, never to return to them.
One left one's labour and one's play to enter upon a new existence in a
strange land. One parted from the friends one had always known, one saw
them never again. Life was indeed a strange thing; and, would a body
comprehend it, then must a body sit staring into the fire, thinking very
hard, unheedful of all idle chatter.

That night, when my mother came to kiss me good-night, I turned my
face to the wall and pretended to be asleep, for children as well as
grown-ups have their foolish moods; but when I felt the so