ch other despairingly. They could think of
no one within a mile or two, except Mrs. Maddock and her little maid,
and how could they reach them, and what could they do to help if they
did! A deep, hopeless despair settled on both of them.

"If you've anything you wants to bring along with you," said her
father curtly, "look sharp and get it. I don't s'pose it's more than
I can carry."

Jessie was too stunned to know quite what she was doing. In her room
she had a big old-fashioned carpet bag that her grandfather had once
given her because she so admired the flowers on its sides, and into
this she thrust some of her clothes without in the least realizing
what she was doing. When, though, she came to her little shelf of
books, to a box Miss Grace had given her, a work-basket her
grandfather and grandmother had bought her on her birthday, and a
picture which had been Miss Barley's present, she stayed her hand.
She would not take any of her treasures to be knocked about perhaps
in a busy lodging-house. She would leave them here, they would seem
like a link between her and home--for no other place would ever be
"home" to her, she knew.

She took her little Prayer-book, the one that had been her mother's,
granny had given it to her on her eighth birthday, and she treasured
it dearly; it had her mother's name and her own written in it, and
that seemed always to draw them nearer and form a little link
between.

It was all soon over, and Jessie, without daring to look around her
beloved little room again, crept away back to her granny, her eyes
blinded with tears.

"Granny, you'll 'tend to my rose for me, won't you," she whispered in
a choked voice, "till I come home again, and--and kiss granp for me,
and--oh, granny, granny, what shall I do, I can't go away! I can't!
I can't! I think I shall die if--"

Perhaps mercifully, her father cut the leave-taking short. No good
could be done, not a fraction of their misery lessened by prolonging
it, and before Jessie had finished sobbing out her last words, he had
picked her up and carried her down-stairs and out of the house.

"This way," he said, when he put her down in the road. "I like
seclusion when I take a walk. There's a station I prefer to
Springbrook, it's one I used to favour a good bit," with a meaning
little laugh, "and if I haven't forgot my way all these years, and
they haven't altered the face of the country, the shortest cut to it
lies through these v