"Look here, my dear, you mustn't build your expectations too high. If you do, we shall all disappoint you; which means that you will suffer."
"But that was a long time ago. I've grown since.… And I didn't kiss you at first because it makes me feel uncomfortable kissing folks out loud. But I'll kiss you in the cars when we get to them."
But by and by, when they found themselves seated alone in a third-class compartment, she forgot her promise, being lost in wonder at this funny mode of travelling. She examined the parcels' rack overhead.
"'For light articles only,'" she read out. "But-but how do we manage when it's bedtime?"
"Bless the child, we don't sleep in the train! Why, in little over an hour we shall be at Merchester, and that's home."
"Home!" Corona caught at the word and repeated it with a shiver of excitement. "Home—in an hour?"
It was not that she distrusted; it was only that she could not focus her mind down to so small a distance.
"And now," said Nurse Branscome cheerfully, as they settled themselves down, "are you going to tell me about your passage, or am I to tell you about your father and the sort of place St. Hospital is? Or would you," added this wise woman, "just like to sit still and look out of window and take it all in for a while?"
"Thank you," answered Corona, "that's what I want, ezactly."
She nestled into her corner as the train drew forth beyond the purlieus and dingy suburbs of the great seaport and out into the country—our south country, all green and glorious with summer. Can this world show the like of it, for comfort of eye and heart?