To me those three years seem like one bright summer. Of course we had winters in them too, but there is a feeling of sunshine all over them. And, actually speaking, those winters were very mild ones—nothing like the occasional severe ones, of another of which I shall soon have to tell.
I was so well too—growing so strong—stronger by far than grandmamma had ever hoped to see me. And as I grew strong I seemed to take in the delightfulness of it, though as a very little girl I had not often complained of feeling weak and tired, for I did not understand the difference.
Now I must tell about the change that came to the Nestors—a sad change for me, for though at first it seemed worse for them, in the end I really think it brought more trouble to granny and me than to our dear friends themselves.
It was one day in the autumn, early in October I think, that the first beginning of the cloud came. Gerard had not long been back at school and we were just settling down into our regular ways again.
'The girls are late this morning,' said grandmamma. 'You see nothing of them from your watch-tower, do you, Helena?'
Granny always called the window-seat in our tiny drawing-room my 'watch-tower.' I had very long sight and I had found out that there was a bit of the road from Moor Court where I could see the pony-cart passing, like a little dark speck, before it got hidden again among the trees. After that open bit I could not see it again at all till it was quite close to our own road, as we called it—I mean the steep bit of rough cart-track leading to our little garden-gate.
I was already crouched up in my pet place, when grandmamma called out to me. She was in the dining-room, but the doors were open.
'No, grandmamma,' I replied. 'I don't see them at all. And I am sure they haven't passed Waving View in the last quarter-of-an-hour, for I have been here all that time.'
'Waving View,' I must explain, was the name we had given to the short stretch of road I have just spoken of, because we used to wave handkerchiefs to each other—I at my watch-tower and Sharley from the pony-cart, at that point.
Grandmamma came into the drawing-room a moment or two after that and stood behind me, looking out at the window.