He meant well, but he did not understand.
Amabel understood, or she thought she did, and knew in her miserable heart that she was sent to Coventry for the last time, and that this time she would stay there.
‘I don’t care,’ she said quite untruly. ‘I’ll never try to be kind to any one again.’ And that wasn’t true either. She was to spend the whole day alone in the best bedroom, the one with the four-post bed and the red curtains and the large wardrobe with a looking-glass in it that you could see yourself in to the very ends of your strap-shoes.
The first thing Amabel did was to look at herself in the glass. She was still sniffing and sobbing, and her eyes were swimming in tears, another one rolled down her nose as she looked—that was very interesting. Another rolled down, and that was the last, because as soon as you get interested in watching your tears they stop.
Next she looked out of the window, and saw [p222 the decorated flower-bed, just as she had left it, very bright and beautiful.
‘Well, it does look nice,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what they say.’
Then she looked round the room for something to read; there was nothing. The old-fashioned best bedrooms never did have anything. Only on the large dressing-table, on the left-hand side of the oval swing-glass, was one book covered in red velvet, and on it, very twistily embroidered in yellow silk and mixed up with misleading leaves and squiggles were the letters, A.B.C.
‘Perhaps it’s a picture alphabet,’ said Mabel, and was quite pleased, though of course she was much too old to care for alphabets. Only when one is very unhappy and very dull, anything is better than nothing. She opened the book.
‘Why, it’s only a time-table!’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s for people when they want to go away, and Auntie puts it here in case they suddenly make up their minds to go, and feel that they can’t wait another minute. I feel like that, only it’s no good, and I expect other people do too.’
She had learned how to use the dictionary, and this seemed to go the same way. She looked up the names of all the places she knew.—Brighton [p223 where she had once spent a month, Rugby where her brother was at school, and Home, which was Amberley—and she saw the times when the trains left for these places, and wished she could go by those trains.