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Conceive the effect on a homesick baby with a superfluity of imagination, and a knowledge of life that would have amused a London sparrow!

It was simplicity itself to Laura. Mother might come at any moment, and she would come, of course, from the station, along the dusty high-road that swept past the end of the lane and that you could see from the window of the inviolate spareroom. Therefore, till her aunt, in desperation, locked the door and hid the key, neither persuasion, scolding, disgrace nor docked puddings, could, on rainy days, keep a mulish Laura from curling up in the forbidden window-seat to watch the distant strip with an air of expectancy that would have made that awaited mother’s heart ache.

The fine days were a more doubtful good. True, boundaries were enlarged, and from the end of the lane a wider vista was under her observation, a white river on which black, far-away specks were for ever swimming boat-like into ken, to swell and lengthen and lighten, at last, into figures of men and women—women in tweedy skirts and blue ribbons and little straw hats, that were always Mother until they were near. What mad terrier-rushes that high-road saw, helter-skelter down the last hundred yards, and what drag-foot returns and hot tears blinked away.