CHAPTER X.
A JOURNEY AND ITS ENDING.
"The way was long, the wind was cold."
Soon after auntie's visit summer really began to come. It was very pleasant while it lasted, but this year it was a very short summer, and the winter that came after was a very severe one, and made many people ill. It did not make Carrots ill, nor Floss, nor any of the Desart children, for they were all strong, but it was very bad for their mother. As the winter went on, she seemed to get weaker and weaker; there were very few days on which she could go out, and if the spring had not been an early and very mild one, I hardly think her strength would have lasted.
But with the finer weather she seemed to get better again. The children were of course very glad, but still they had not felt frightened by her illness. It had come on so slowly and gradually that they had got accustomed to it, as children do. They thought it was just the cold wintry weather that had made her ill, and that when the spring came she would get better. And when the spring came and she did get better, they were perfectly satisfied and happy.
By the end of this summer Carrots was seven years old—no longer in the least a baby, though he was not tall for his age. He could read, of course, perfectly, and write a little. Now and then he wrote little letters to Sybil in answer to hers, for she was very particular about getting answers. She was only just beginning to learn to write, and sometimes when she got tired of working away at real "A's" and "B's" and "C's" in her letters, she would dash off into a lot of "scribble," which she said was "children's writing," and "if Carrots didn't know what it meant he must be very stupid, as he was a child too."
Carrots didn't know what it meant, but he never liked to say so, and I dare say it did not much matter. But his letters to Sybil were quite real. Any one could have understood them.
Long ago Floss and he had bought their hoops. They were quite "old friends" now. They had bought them at the toy-shop, just as they had planned, and, curiously enough when their mamma and nurse counted up how much was owing to them for the sugar, it came to exactly the price of the hoops.
But I must tell you what happened just about the time Carrots had his seventh birthday. The summer was nearly over again and already the cold winds, of which there were so many at Sandyshore, were beginning to be felt. Floss noticed that her mother very seldom went out now, and even in the house she generally had to wrap herself up in a shawl.
"Mamma, I hope the cold weather isn't going to make you ill again?" Floss said, one day when she and Carrots came in from a race on the sands, all hot and rosy with running.