"Not till I'm seventeen, perhaps," the voice was doleful, "and that's just ages to wait. Daisy Phillips has been to London three times, and she's only ten! She crows over me dreadfully."
"Poor old Cuckoo! You're a badly-used child! See what I've got for you inside this parcel."
"A Japanese pencil-box! The very thing I wanted! And such a lovely one! It's nicer than anybody else's in the whole form."
"Then you'll score over Daisy for once!"
"Rather! Lorraine, you're a trump! Oh, and the ducky little blue knife inside, and pink pencils! I know everybody'll want to borrow them at once, but I shan't lend them to a single soul! They're too nice even to use myself. Do say I'm not to lend them, and then the girls needn't call me stingy."
"All right! I absolutely forbid them to be lent. Where's Rosemary? I've a parcel here that may interest her. No, Cuckoo! You're not to peep inside. What a Paul Pry you are! Go and call her, and I'll show it to her myself."
Somehow Lorraine felt as if the little visit to London had suddenly added years to her age. It had enlarged her circle of experiences so greatly that she had begun to look on life from almost a grown-up standpoint. She had gone away, older certainly than Monica, but regarded in the family category as one of "the children", and she had returned to take her place on a level with Richard, Donald, Rodney, and Rosemary. She was allowed to read Richard's letters from Mesopotamia, instead of only having portions retailed to her; and she was not sent out of the room now, when Father and Mother discussed Rodney's future for those halcyon times when peace should be declared, and he should leave the Air Force. She began in some measure to realize her mother's daily, hourly anxiety about these boys at the front, and to understand how behind all the happiness of her daily life stood a nightmare, with a spectral hand raised ever ready to fall on those three best beloved.
Trouble, which mercifully spared their own family, struck nevertheless very near. A yellow envelope arrived one day at the Barton Forresters' house, and Aunt Carrie opened it with trembling fingers and a sinking heart.
"There's no answer!" she said briefly to the waiting telegraph girl. Then she sat down and tried to face what the short message from the War Office really conveyed. Only twelve words, but it meant the hope of a family trailed in the dust. Lindon, their one treasured boy, had "gone west". Well, other mothers had given their dearest and best! She would offer him gladly, joyfully, on the altar of Britain's glory! But her face seemed to grow suddenly shrunken, and the high colour faded from her cheeks, leaving a network of little red veins instead.
"If only she wouldn't try to be quite so brave about it!" said Mrs. George Forrester. "It's such a terrific effort for her to keep up like this! Why, the very next day she went to the Red Cross Hospital just as usual. She hasn't slacked a single thing. The strain must be tremendous. She absolutely worshipped that poor boy! The girls hadn't an innings in comparison with him. I admire the way she's taking it, but I'm afraid some day it will be more than she can stand, and she'll just collapse. If it had been Richard, I couldn't have borne to speak of him to anybody just at first, yet she talks quite calmly of Lindon. It's too much for human nature!"