t to wave his handkerchief in farewell, and when presently he
went back with Nurse into the thin red house and was triumphantly led
into the drawing-room, he was not raised to any particular happiness by
the lancer's uniform, displayed on a large square of cardboard. He
suffered himself to be dressed up and to have the scarlet breast-plate
strapped around him and the plumed helmet to be pushed over his nose and
the sabre-tache to be entangled with his legs; but there was no spirit
of hope and adventure flaming in his breast--only an empty feeling and a
desire to look out of the night-nursery window at the trains going by
with happy people inside.

Chapter II: _Bittersweet_

His mother's absence made very sad for Michael the tall thin house, in
Carlington Road. He felt enclosed in the restraint from which his mother
had flown like a bird. Time stretched before him in unimaginable
reckonings. It was now the beginning of autumn, and the leaves of the
lime trees, falling to lie stained and unlovely in sodden basements,
moved Michael with a sense of the long winter before him, with the
unending black nights and the dark wet dawns. From the window of the
night-nursery he recognized for the first time the beauty of the
unsymmetrical plane tree that now, when the poplars were mere swishing
bundles of twigs, still defied the October winds with wide green leaves.
Soon, however, by a damp frost the plane tree was conquered, and its
blobs jigged to November gusts. Fogs began, and the morning-room was
always gaslit, even for dinner at one o'clock. Stella was peevish, and
games became impossible. The two black kittens were an entertainment and
took part with Michael in numberless dramas of revenge and punishment,
of remorse and exaggerated cherishing. These histrionic pastimes became
infused with a terrible reality, when one day the favourite kitten
jumped from Michael's arms over the banisters and fell on to the tiled
floor of the hall, hurting herself internally so that she had to be
poisoned. He stood by her grave in the blackened mould of the garden,
and wished poignantly that he had never spoken harshly to her, had never
banished her to a waste-paper basket prison for the length of a long
foggy afternoon.

Christmas arrived with more uniforms, with a fishmonger's shop and a
mechanical mackerel which when wound up would click in finny progress
from one end of the bath to the other and back. It was wound up every
Sunday