Of course Ida implicitly believed all this.

Her mind contained pictures of a beautiful little house just outside London in which her mother had once lived, and her imagination busied itself with the time when they would both live in just that same way.

She was going to be a teacher, so it had been decided in confidential chats, and would one day have a school of her own.

In such a future Lotty herself really believed.

The child seemed to her extraordinarily clover, and in four more years she would be as old as a girl who had assisted with the little ones in the first school she went to.