That was all that Betty had intended to put into her trunk, but when they were in, there was still so much room that she decided to take her books and several of her chief treasures.  “They will be safer,” she said to herself, and she filled a box with cotton in which to pack some of her breakable keepsakes.  She had hesitated some time about taking her scrap-book, an old ledger on whose blank pages she had written many verses.  She hardly dared call them poetry, and yet they were dear to her, because they were the outpourings of her lonely little heart.

All the children knew that she “made up rhymes,” but only Davy had any knowledge of the old ledger.  He could not understand all the verses she read to him about the wild flowers, and life and death and time, but they jingled pleasantly in his ears, and he made an attentive listener.

“I’ll take it,” she decided at last, slipping some loose pages in between the covers.  “I may want to write something at Locust.”

She paused long at the foot of her bed, trying to make up her mind about her godmother’s picture, that hung there in a little frame of pine cones.

“I don’t know whether to take it or not,” she said to Davy, looking up lovingly at the Madonna of her dreams, whose sweet face had been her last greeting at night, and first welcome on waking, for several years.  “I hate to leave it behind, but I’ll have my real godmother to look at while I’m gone, and it’ll seem so nice to have this picture here to smile at me when I get back, as if she was glad I’d come home.  I believe I’ll leave it.”

It was a solemn moment when Betty climbed into the wagon after her trunk had been lifted in at the back, and perched herself on the high spring seat, beside Davy and his father.  The other children were drawn up in a line along the porch, to watch her go.  She wore one of her every-day dresses of dark blue gingham, and her white sunbonnet, but the familiar little figure had taken on a new interest to them.  They regarded her as some sort of a venturesome Columbus, about to launch on a wild voyage of discovery.  None of them had ever been beyond Jaynes’s Post-office in their journeyings, and the youngest had not seen even that much of the outside world.

Betty herself could not remember having been on a longer trip than to Livermore, a village ten miles away.  There was an excited flutter in her throat as the wagon started forward with a jolt, and she realised that now she was looking her last on safe familiar scenes, and breaking loose from all safe familiar landmarks.

“Good-bye!” she cried again, looking back at the little group on the porch with tears in her eyes.

“Good-bye!  Good-bye!” they called, in a noisy chorus, repeating the call like a brood of clacking guineas, until the wagon passed out of sight down the lane.  The road turned at the church.  Betty leaned forward for one more look at the window, on whose sill she had passed so many happy afternoons reading to Davy.  The board was still leaning against the house, where she had propped it.