But, try as she would, now that the reality was so close
on her, she could not visualize it or relate it to herself. The mere
juxtaposition of the two names--Coral, Nick--which in old times she had
so often laughingly coupled, now produced a blur in her brain.

She continued to sit helplessly beside the hall-table, the tears running
down her cheeks. The appearance of the bonne aroused her. Her youngest
charge, Geordie, had been feverish for a day or two; he was better,
but still confined to the nursery, and he had heard Susy unlock the
house-door, and could not imagine why she had not come straight up to
him. He now began to manifest his indignation in a series of racking
howls, and Susy, shaken out of her trance, dropped her cloak and
umbrella and hurried up.

"Oh, that child!" she groaned.

Under the Fulmer roof there was little time or space for the indulgence
of private sorrows. From morning till night there was always some
immediate practical demand on one's attention; and Susy was beginning
to see how, in contracted households, children may play a part less
romantic but not less useful than that assigned to them in fiction,
through the mere fact of giving their parents no leisure to dwell on
irremediable grievances. Though her own apprenticeship to family life
had been so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapid mental
readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery her private cares
were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature, diet and medicine.

Such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time it
happened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility of temper.
"What a child I was myself six months ago!" she thought, wondering that
Nick's influence, and the tragedy of their parting, should have done
less to mature and steady her than these few weeks in a house full of
children.

Pacifying Geordie was not easy, for he had long since learned to use
his grievances as a pretext for keeping the offender at his beck with a
continuous supply of stories, songs and games. "You'd better be careful
never to put yourself in the wrong with Geordie," the astute Junie had
warned Susy at the outset, "because he's got such a memory, and he won't
make it up with you till you've told him every fairy-tale he's ever
heard before."

But on this occasion, as soon as he saw her, Geordie's indignation
melted. She was still in the doorway, compunctious, abject and racking
her dazed brain for h