She dressed in a quick nervous fashion, did her hair with more care than usual, and then picked up the General and took him along the passage into the nursery.  All the others were here, and, with Esther, were evidently discussing her.  The three girls looked tearful and protesting; Pip had just been brought to book for speaking disrespectfully of his father, and was looking sullen; and Bunty, not knowing what else to do at such a crisis, had fallen to catching flies, and was viciously taking off their wings.

It was a wretched meal:  The bell sounded for the downstairs breakfast, and Esther had to go.  Everyone offered Judy everything on the table, and spoke gently and politely to her.  She seemed to be apart from them, a person not to be lightly treated in the dignity of this great trouble.  Her dress, too, was quite new—­ a neat blue serge fresh from the dressmaker’s hands; her boots were blacked and bright, her stockings guiltless of ventilatory chasms.  All this helped to make her a Judy quite different from the harum-scarum one of a few days back, who used to come to breakfast looking as if her clothes had been pitchforked upon her.

Baby addressed herself to her porridge for one minute, but the next her feelings overcame her, and, with a little wail, she rushed round the table to Judy, and hung on her arm sobbing.  This destroyed the balance of the whole company.  Nell got the other arm and swayed to and fro in an excess of misery.  Meg’s tears rained down into her teacup; Pip dug his heel in the hearthrug, and wondered what was the matter with his eyes; and even Bunty’s appetite for bread and butter diminished.

Judy sat there silent; she had pushed back her unused plate, and sat regarding it with an expression of utter despair on her young face.  She looked like a miniature tragedy queen going to immediate execution.

Presently Bunty got off his chair, covered up his coffee with his saucer to keep the flies out, and solemnly left the room.  In a minute he returned with a pickle bottle, containing an enormous green frog.

“You can have it to keep for your very own, Judy,” he said, in a tone of almost reckless sadness.  “It’ll, keep you amused, perhaps, at school.”  Self-sacrifice could go no further, for this frog was the darling of Bunty’s heart.

This stimulated the others; everyone fetched some offering to lay at Judy’s shrine for a keepsake.  Meg brought a bracelet, plaited out of the hair of a defunct pet pony.  Pip gave his three-bladed pocketknife.  Nell a pot of musk that she had watered and cherished for a year, Baby had a broken-nosed doll, that was the Benjamin of her large family.

“Put them in the trunk, Meg—­there’s room on top, I think,” Judy said in a choking voice, and deeply touched by these gifts.  “Oh! and, Bunty, dear! put a cork over the f—­f—­frog, will you? it might get lost, poor thing! in that b—­b—­big box.”

“All right,” said Bunty, “You’ll take c—­c—­care of it, w—­won’t you, Judy?  Oh dear, oh—­h—­h!—­boo-hoo!”