of nights in bed, that she had spent a brief space before falling asleep in dreaming of going to seek her mother.  But whole months had passed without any such thought; and during these long interludes the healthy country scenes about her, and the common causes for smiles and tears in a child’s life, filled her consciousness.  Still, the undercurrent of the deeper life was there, and very small incidents were strong enough to bring it to the surface.  Molly had short daily lessons from the clergyman’s daughter, a young lady who also took a cheerful, airy view of the child, and said she would grow out of her little faults in time.  In one of these lessons Molly learnt with surprising eagerness how to find France for herself on the map.  That France was much nearer to England than to India, and how it was usual to cross the Channel were facts easily acquired.  Molly was amazingly backward in her lessons, or she must have learnt these things before.  When lessons were over and she went out into the garden, instead of running as usual she walked so slowly that Mrs. Carteret, while talking to the gardener, actually wondered what was in that child’s mind.  Molly was living through again the parting with the ayah.  She could feel the intensely familiar touch of the soft, dark hand; she could see the adoring love of the dark eyes with their passionate anger at the separation.  The woman had to be revenged on her enemies who were tearing the child from her.  “They deceive you,” she said.  “The beautiful mother is not dead; she lives in France, not England; they will try to keep you from her, but the faithful child will find a way.”

Molly unconsciously in her own mind had already begun to put these words into English, whereas a year before she would have kept to the ayah’s own language.  But in either language those words came to her as the last message from that other life of warmth and love and colour in which she had once been a queen.  Indeed, every English child brought home from India is a sovereign dethroned.  And the repetition of the ayah’s last words gave utterance to a sense of wrong that Molly nourished against her present rulers and against the world in which she was not understood.

That same day Mrs. Carteret spoke sharply and with indignation because Molly had trodden purely by accident on the pug; and her aunt said that the one thing with which she had no patience was cruelty to animals—­whereas the child was passionately fond of animals.  Again, on that same day, Molly fell into a very particularly dirty little pond near the cowshed at the farm.  Mary, the nurse, no doubt was the sufferer, and she said that she did not suppose that black nurses minded being covered with muck—­how should they?—­and she supposed she must be treated as if she were a negro herself, but time would show whether she were a black slave or an Englishwoman with a house of her own which she could have now if she liked for the asking.  While Mary spoke she pushed and pulled, and, in general treated Molly’s small person as something unpleasant, and to be kept at a distance.  Once clean and dressed again, Molly sat down quite quietly to consider the ways and means of getting to France, with the result already told.