“Suppose you go and ask Spot first, whether she’d like it, Olly,” said Mrs. Norton, patting his sunburnt little face.

CHAPTER II

A JOURNEY NORTH

Milly and Oliver lived at Willingham, a little town in Oxfordshire, as I have already told you.  Their father was a doctor, and they lived in an old-fashioned house, in a street, with a long shady garden stretching away behind it.  Milly and Oliver loved their father, and whenever he put his brown face inside the nursery door, two pairs of little feet went running to meet him, and two pairs of little hands pulled him eagerly into the room.  But they saw him very seldom; whereas their mother was always with them, teaching them their lessons, playing with them in the garden, telling them stories, mending their frocks, tucking them up in their snug little beds at night, sometimes praising them, sometimes scolding them; always loving and looking after them.  Milly and Olly honestly believed that theirs was the best mother in the whole world.  Nobody else could find out such nice plays, or tell them such wonderful stories, or dress dolls half so well.  Two little neighbours of theirs, Jacky and Francis, had a poor sick mother who always lay on the sofa, and could hardly bear to have her little boys in the room with her.  Milly and Oliver were never tired of wondering how Jacky and Francis got on with a mother like that.  “How funny, and how dreadful it must be.  Poor Jacky and Francis!” It never came into their, heads to say, “Poor Jacky’s mother” too, but then you see they were such little people, and little people have only room in their heads for a very few thoughts at a time.

However, Milly had been away from her mother a good deal lately.  About six months before my story begins she had been sent to school, to a kindergarten, as she was taught to call it.  And there Milly had learnt all kinds of wonderful things—­she had learnt how to make mats out of paper, blue mats, and pink mats, and yellow mats, and red mats; she had learned how to make a bit of soft clay look like a box, or a stool, or a bird’s nest with three clay eggs inside it; she had begun to add up and take away; and, above all, she had begun to learn geography, and Fraeulein—­for Milly’s mistress was a German, and had a German name—­was just now teaching her about islands, and lakes, and capes, and peninsulas, and many other things that all little girls have to learn about some time or other, unless they wish to grow up dunces.

As for Milly’s looks, I have told you already that she had blue eyes and a turn-up nose, and a dear sensible little face.  And she had very thick fair hair, that was always tumbling about her eyes, and making her look, as nurse told her, like “a yellow owl in an ivy bush.”  Milly loved most people, except perhaps John the gardener, who was rather cross to the children, and was always calling to them not to walk “on them beds,” and