Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/64

52 just the same— By Jove! the very same heliotropes and pansies in the very same border—and the jasmine and the sundial and everything."

"They tell me the trees have grown," she said. "I like to think it's all the same. Why didn't you tell me you were coming home? Come in."

She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds.

"I don't know. I wanted to surprise you—and, by George! I've surprised myself. It's beautiful. It's all just as it used to be, Dolly."

The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be.

"I'll tell them you're staying for lunch."

She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to catch strongly at her lost composure.

If anyone had had the right to ask the reason of her agitation, and had asked it, Dorothea would have said that the sudden happening of