We drove away from a cheering crowd of cricketers and farm-labourers, as if discharged from a great gun.

'A royal salvo!' said my father, and asked me earnestly whether I had forgotten to reward and take a particular farewell of any one of my friends.

I told him I had forgotten no one, and thought it was true, until on our way up the sandy lane, which offered us a last close view of the old wall-flower farm front, I saw little Mabel Sweetwinter, often my playfellow and bedfellow, a curly-headed girl, who would have danced on Sunday for a fairing, and eaten gingerbread nuts during a ghost-story.

She was sitting by a furze-bush in flower, cherishing in her lap a lamb that had been worried.

She looked half up at me, and kept looking so, but would not nod.