This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as I knew) my whole life.  On that day week, amply provided with all necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading.

Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept bitterly.  I thought that I ought to have known her better after so many years and ought to have made myself enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then.  When she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone porch—­it was a very frosty day—­I felt so miserable and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!

“No, Esther!” she returned.  “It is your misfortune!”

The coach was at the little lawn-gate—­we had not come out until we heard the wheels—­and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart.  She went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the door.  As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the window through my tears.  My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost and snow.  A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in her own shawl and quietly laid her—­I am half ashamed to tell it—­in the garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window.  I had no companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage.

When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night’s snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away.  There was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the other window and took no notice of me.

I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the coach gave me a terrible start.

It said, “What the de-vil are you crying for?”

I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a whisper, “Me, sir?” For of course I knew it must have been the gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking out of his window.

“Yes, you,” he said, turning round.

“I didn’t know I was crying, sir,” I faltered.

“But you are!” said the gentleman.  “Look here!” He came quite opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed me that it was wet.