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Do you understand now why Laura—who will always keep that balance, I believe, however old she grows—could, with only the Kent hills between her and heaven, be yet distinctly relieved that Nurse’s mother had been there before her, and that children were half price? Fantasy, you see, like a fairy sixpence, had been rung upon the counter of Nurse’s mother’s experiences and pronounced coin of the realm.

Laura—but I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, Collaborator! I lose the thread. You shall censor it all afterwards, but first let me talk myself out. And it is not polite to murmur “Impossible” pointedly to your pointed knitting needles!

But Laura, all this while, has sat meekly between the twins, eating her biscuits, a good little grubby-handed girl.

She was always good when she was left alone, as the new nurse had at last discovered; so when the biscuits had been eaten and the children dismissed to another hour’s play before going home, it was with the twins that Nurse’s paperback shared her attention, rather than with Laura, slipping away so quietly that her little thin dark body and red-brown head wavering in and out of the big trunks was scarcely to be distinguished from a slim beech sapling a-sway in the wind. Nurse would have settled down to her reading with less composure if she could have seen beyond the screen of trees, have caught Laura’s backward glances, half scared, half triumphant, as she gained the open hill-top, and her odd proceedings when she decided that she was out of every one’s inquisitive sight.