the fire was lighted and the kettle was put on to boil.
Nannie drove up in a four wheeler. I was in the hall to meet her.
She lingered to look at everything. She went round and round the
dining-room, up to the drawing-room, even into the spare room, but no
word of nursery. "Which is my room?" she said.

"It's upstairs," I said. "Won't you come and look at it?"

"There's no hurry, is there, miss?"

I could see it was the nursery floor she dreaded.

"Well, there is rather a hurry, Nannie," I said. "I am so anxious to see
if you like all the house."

At last I got her upstairs. I threw open the nursery door. It was too
sudden, no doubt. At the sight of the kettle, the rocking-horse, the
tea-set, she burst into tears.

"Dear, dear Nannie," I said, "it is your own nursery; it's all from
Hames."

She paused in her sobs. "The robin mug's wrong," she said, and she
moved it to the opposite side of the table; "he always sat there." "He"
applied to a little brother who had died, not to the mug.

"It's a very small nursery, Nannie," I said apologetically.

"Well, there are no children to make it untidy," she answered.

So Nannie and I settled down in our nursery, and through the darkening
of that first evening she talked to me of my mother. It seems to me very
wonderful how one woman can so devotedly love the children of another,
but was it not greatly for the love of that other woman that Nannie
loved us so much? It is her figure, I know, that Nannie sees when she
shuts her eyes and re-peoples the nursery in her dreams,--that lovely
mother, the center of that nursery and home; that mother so quick to
praise, so loath to blame, so ready to find good in everything, so
tender to suffering, so pitiful to sin!

"Tell me about her when she was quite young, Nannie," I said.

And Nannie talked on, telling me the stories I knew by heart and loved
so dearly; and then, I remember, she started up.

"What is it, Nannie?" I asked.

"I thought she was calling," she replied; "I often seem to hear her
voice."

Dear Nannie! I believe she is ready to answer that call at any moment,
for all the love of her new nursery.

That is how I came to live in London.

Chapter VIII

Most people, I imagine, who live in London are asked by their relatives
and friends who live in the country to shop for them. My post is often
nothing more upsetting than on a very hot summer's morning, or a wet
winter's one, to find an envelope on