’But listen to me. I am telling you!  One runs out to look, because one is little and cannot see well.  So one peeps between the man’s legs, and then—­you know how close those big horses and guns turn the corners—­then one’s foot slips and one gets run over.  That’s how it happens.  Several times it had happened, but not many times; certainly not a hundred, perhaps not twenty.  So, you see, you must be all.  Tell me now that you are all that there are, and Anna shall give you the cakes.’

‘Thousands,’ a boy repeated monotonously.  ’Then we all come here to wait till our people come for us.’

‘But now we will go away from here.  The poor lady is tired,’ said the elder girl, plucking his sleeve.

‘Oh, you hurt, you hurt!’ he cried, and burst into tears.

‘What is that for?’ said Frau Ebermann.  ’To cry in a room where a poor lady is sick is very inconsiderate.’

‘Oh, but look, lady!’ said the elder girl.

Frau Ebermann looked and saw.

‘Au revoir, lady.’  They made their little smiling bows and curtseys undisturbed by her loud cries. ’Au revoir, lady.  We will wait till our people come for us.’

When Anna at last ran in, she found her mistress on her knees, busily cleaning the floor with the lace cover from the radiator, because, she explained, it was all spotted with the blood of five children—­she was perfectly certain there could not be more than five in the whole world—­who had gone away for the moment, but were now waiting round the corner, and Anna was to find them and give them cakes to stop the bleeding, while her mistress swept and garnished that Our dear Lord when He came might find everything as it should be.

Mary Postgate

(1915)

Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was ’thoroughly conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike.  I am very sorry to part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.’

Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for she had had experience of companions, found that it was true.  Miss Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed care she did not exhaust her attendant’s vitality.  On the contrary, she gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences.  Her father had been a minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect.  Some of Miss Fowler’s tales, none the less, were not always for the young.  Mary was not young, and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was never shocked.  She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end, ‘How interesting!’ or ‘How shocking!’ as the case might be, and never again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which ‘did not dwell on these things.’  She was, too, a treasure at domestic accounts, for which