The look of dread came back into poor Miss Patch’s tired eyes.  So gloomy a prospect determined her.

“You are right!” she gasped; “it would be terrible—­yes.  I’ll go—­I do believe I will.  Oh, my! it’s a dreadfully big undertaking, but—­ but I’ll go, yes, I will.  I will make up my mind; and—­and I won’t go back from it.  I am terribly given to being a coward, Jessie.”

Her mind once made up Miss Patch did not swerve again, and from that time her face grew brighter.  And after all it was not such a very big undertaking—­not nearly as bad as she had feared, for everything seemed to fall out for her in a perfectly marvellous way, and most of her troubles were taken off her shoulders before she had been able to realize them.

A few letters passed between Jessie and Miss Grace, and then between Mrs. Lang and Miss Grace, and then all seemed to come about so smoothly and easily that Miss Patch scarcely realized all that was being accomplished.  Mrs. Lang insisted on paying the charges for the furniture being carried to Springbrook.  Tom Salter saw to the packing of them all and sending them off by train; and then, oddly enough, Miss Grace Barley found that she had business in London, and would be returning to Springbrook on the very day Jessie and Miss Patch were expected there, and would travel down with them.

So, on the morning of that day, a cab drove up to the dingy house in Fort Street, and Miss Patch, and her eight parcels, and her rosebush was conveyed to the station in state and comfort, and between Jessie and Miss Grace and Tom she was taken to the railway carriage and comfortably ensconced in a corner without any bother as to luggage or ticket-taking or anything.

In fact, she was so excited and bewildered that she quite forgot all about everything.  “Well!” she exclaimed, as the train moved off into the strange new country, “I never knew before how delightful and easy travelling could be!  It makes me smile now to think how I shrank from it, and the fuss I made!”

Jessie, who was still weeping silently after the parting with her mother and Tom Salter, looked up and smiled sympathetically.  The bustle and responsibility of taking care of Miss Patch had helped them all through the last sad leave-takings, but when that strain was over, and they were comfortably settled, and Tom came up to say his last shy good-bye, the realization rushed over her that she should never see the dingy grey house again, nor her stepmother, nor Tom—­ good, kind, faithful Tom—­and it was with tears running down her face that she threw her arms round the good fellow’s neck, and kissed him as though he were her own kind big brother.  Then, subsiding into her corner sobbing, she left London in grief nearly as great as when she had arrived there two years before.