childhood that was parting from her for ever. When he came to see them
he would be something different,--a man, an independent being. As long
ago physically, now spiritually, the umbilical cord had been cut.

With Esther and Dot and Mat the parting was hardly a parting, as it was
rather a promise of their all meeting together some day in a new place
of freedom, which there was a sense of his going out to prepare for
them. Their way would be his way, as the mother's could not; for theirs
was the highway of youth, which, sooner or later, they would all take
together, singing in the morning sun.

The three younger sisters, the as yet unopened buds of the family
flower, took Henry's departure with the surface tears and the central
indifference of childhood. When a family is so large, it practically
includes two generations in itself; and these three girls were really to
prove a generation so different in characteristics from their four
elders as to demand a separate chronicle to themselves.

Thus as Henry drove away amid his trunks from the home of his father
(genealogical poverty denies us the romantic grandiloquence of the
plural), it was his mother's farewell arms and farewell tears, and his
farewell promises to her, of which he was mainly conscious. He had
promised "to take care of himself," and particularly to beware of damp
sheets, and then he too had burst into tears. Indeed, it was generally a
tearful business, after which everybody was glad to retire into corners
to subside privately and dry themselves.

Henry crouched in the corner of his cab with fully half his cry to
finish out; and, curiously, all the time a sad little story from an old
holiday in the country kept haunting him. It was at once a fact and a