CHAPTER III.
THREE LITTLE TRAVELLERS.
"What will she do for their laughter and plays,
Chattering nonsense, and sweet saucy ways?"
I will now try to go straight on with my story. But I cannot help saying I do not find it quite so easy as I thought. It is so very difficult to keep things in order and not to put in bits that have no business to come for ever so much longer. I think after this I shall always be even more obliged than I have been to people that write stories, for really when you come to do it, it isn't nearly so easy as you'd think, though to read the stories, it seems as if everything in them came just of itself without the least trouble.
I told you that after it was really settled and known, and all arranged about the goings away, things seemed to go on very fast. In one way they did and in one way they didn't—for now when I look back to it, it seems to me that that bit of time—the time when it was all quite settled to be and yet hadn't come—was very long. I hear big people say that children get quickly accustomed to anything. I think big people do too. We all—papa and mother, and the boys and I, and even Pierson and the other servants—got used to feeling something was going to come. We got used to living with people coming to see the house, and every now and then great vans coming from the railway to take away packing-cases, and an always feeling that the day—the dreadful day—was going to come. Of course I cannot remember all the little particular things exactly, but I have a very clear remembrance of the sort of way it all happened, so though I may not be able to put down just the very words we said and all that, still it is telling it truly, I think, to put down as nearly as I can the little bits that make the whole. And even some of the littlest bits I can remember the most clearly—is not that queer? I can remember the dress mother had on the last morning, I can remember just how the scarf round her neck was tied, and how one end got rumpled up with the way Tom clung to her, and hugged and hugged her with his arms round her, so tight, that papa had almost to force him away.
But in my usual way I am going on too fast—at least putting things out of their places. I do not think I in the least understood then, what I do so well understand now, how terribly hard it must have been for mother to leave us; how much more dreadful her part of it was than any one else's. I must have seemed very heartless. I remember one day when she was packing books and music and odd things that she would not of course have taken with her just for a journey, I said to her, "Why, mother, what a lot of books you are taking! And all those table-covers and mats and things—you never take those when we go to the sea-side." Papa was standing by and mother looked up at him. "Need I take them?" she said. "It is as if I were going to make a home out there, and oh, how can it ever be like a home? How could I wish it to be? The barer and less home-like the better I should like it."
Papa looked troubled.
"We have to think of appearances, you know," he said. "So many people will come to see you, and it would not do to look as if we took no interest in the place."