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