“And why not?”

“Because you’ve been unkind to mamma and cruel to me, and because you think there’s nobody but Betsy Beauty.  And I’ll tell them at the Convent that you are making mamma ill, and you’re as bad as . . . as bad as the bad women in the Bible!”

“My gracious!” said Aunt Bridget, and she tried to laugh, but I could see that her face became as white as a whitewashed wall.  This did not trouble me in the least until I reached the carriage, when Father Dan, who was sitting inside, said: 

“My little Mary won’t leave home like that—­without kissing her aunt and saying good-bye to her cousins.”

So I returned and shook hands with Nessy MacLeod and Betsy Beauty, and lifted my little face to my Aunt Bridget.

“That’s better,” she said, after she had kissed me, but when I had passed her my quick little ear caught the words: 

“Good thing she’s going, though.”

During this time my father, with the morning mist playing like hoar-frost about his iron-grey hair, had been tramping the gravel and saying the horses were getting cold, so without more ado he bundled me into the carriage and banged the door on me.

But hardly had we started when Father Dan, who was blinking his little eyes and pretending to blow his nose on his coloured print handkerchief, said, “Look!” and pointed up to my mother’s room.

There she was again, waving and kissing her hand to me through her open window, and she continued to do so until we swirled round some trees and I lost the sight of her.

What happened in my mother’s room when her window was closed I do not know, but I well remember that, creeping into a corner of the carriage.  I forgot all about the glory and grandeur of going away, and that it did not help me to remember when half way down the drive a boy with a dog darted from under the chestnuts and raced alongside of us.

It was Martin, and though his right arm was in a sling, he leapt up to the step and held on to the open window by his left hand while he pushed his head into the carriage and made signs to me to take out of his mouth a big red apple which he held in his teeth by the stalk.  I took it, and then he dropped to the ground, without uttering a word, and I could laugh now to think of the gruesome expression of his face with its lagging lower lip and bloodshot eyes.  I had no temptation to do so then, however, and least of all when I looked back and saw his little one-armed figure in the big mushroom hat, standing on the top of the high wall of the bridge, with William Rufus beside him.

We reached Blackwater in good tithe for the boat, and when the funnels had ceased trumpeting and we were well away, I saw that we were sitting in one of two private cabins on the upper deck; and then Father Dan told me that the other was occupied by the young Lord Raa, and his guardian, and that they were going up together for the first time to Oxford.