At last I got her upstairs.  I threw open the nursery door.  It was too sudden, no doubt.  At the sight of the kettle, the rocking-horse, the tea-set, she burst into tears.

“Dear, dear Nannie,” I said. “it is your own nursery; it’s all from Hames.”

She paused in her sobs.  “The robin mug’s wrong,” she said, and she moved it to the opposite side of the table; “he always sat there.”  “He” applied to a little brother who had died, not to the mug.

“It’s a very small nursery, Nannie,” I said apologetically.

“Well, there are no children to make it untidy,” she answered.

So Nannie and I settled down in our nursery, and through the darkening of that first evening she talked to me of my mother.  It seems to me very wonderful how one woman can so devotedly love the children of another, but was it not greatly for the love of that other woman that Nannie loved us so much?  It is her figure, I know, that Nannie sees when she shuts her eyes and re-peoples the nursery in her dreams, —­ that lovely mother, the center of that nursery and home; that mother so quick to praise, so loath to blame, so ready to find good in everything, so tender to suffering, so pitiful to sin!

“Tell me about her when she was quite young, Nannie,” I said.

And Nannie talked on, telling me the stories I knew by heart and loved so dearly; and then, I remember, she started up.

“What is it, Nannie? " I asked.

“I thought she was calling,” she replied; “I often seem to hear her voice.”

Dear Nannie!  I believe she is ready to answer that call at any moment, for all the love of her new nursery.

That is how I came to live in London.

Chapter VIII

Most people, I imagine, who live in London are asked by their relatives and friends who live in the country to shop for them.  My post is often a matter of great anxiety to me, and I know nothing more upsetting than on a very hot summer’s morning, or a wet winter’s one, to find an envelope on my plate, or beside it, addressed in Cousin Anastasia’s large handwriting.  “Dearest,” the letter inside it begins, “if” (heavily underlined) “you should be passing Paternoster Row, will you choose me a nice little prayer-book, without a cross on it, please; people tell me they are cheaper there than elsewhere, prayer-books, I mean, for Jane, who is going to be confirmed.  She is such a nice clean girl.  I do hope she will be as clean after her confirmation, but one never can tell.  In any case I feel I ought to give her something, and a prayer-book, under the circumstances, seems the most suitable thing.”

Jane, I remember, is a kitchen-maid.  Of course I never pass Paternoster Row, but that to a country cousin of Anastasia’s mental caliber is not worth consideration.  She has no knowledge of geography, London’s or otherwise, and is doubtless one of those people who think New Zealand is another name for Australia.