"Well--we got to my grandmother's--my father lifted me out of the carriage, and I followed him upstairs--my grandmother was sitting in the drawing-room, evidently expecting us. She came forward with a bright kind smile on her face, and kissed me fondly. Then she said to my father she was so glad he had brought me, and she hoped I would have a happy day. And my father looked at me as he went away with a sort of wistful anxiety that made me again have that horrible feeling of not deserving his care and affection. And oh, how I wished the long day alone with my grandmother were over! I could not bear being in the drawing-room, I was afraid of seeming to glance in the direction of the china cupboard; I felt miserable whenever my grandmother spoke kindly to me.
"And how kind she was that day! If ever a little girl _should_ have been happy, that little girl was I. Grandmother let me look over the drawers where she kept her beautiful scraps of silk and velvet, ever so many of which she gave me--lovely pieces to make a costume such as I had fancied for Lady Rosabelle, but which I had never had the heart to see about. She let me 'tidy' her best work-box--a _wonderful_ box, full of every conceivable treasure and curiosity--and then, when I was a little tired with all my exertions, she made me sit down on a footstool at her feet and talked to me so nicely--all about when _she_ was a little girl--fancy that, Molly, your great-great-grandmother ever having been a little girl!--and about the queer legends and fairy tales that in those days were firmly believed in in the far-away Scotch country place where her childhood was spent. For the first time for all these unhappy ten days, I began to feel like myself again. Sitting there at my grandmother's feet listening to her I actually forgot my troubles, though I was in the very drawing-room I had learnt so to dread, within a few yards of the cupboard I dared not even glance at.
"There came a little pause in the conversation; I leaned my head against my grandmother's knee.
"'I wish there were fairies now,' I said. 'Don't you, grandmother?'
"Grandmother said 'no, on the whole she preferred things being as they were.' There were _some_ fairies certainly she would be sorry to lose, Princess Sweet-temper, and Lady Make-the-best-of-it, and old Madame Tidy, and, most of all perhaps, the beautiful fairy _Candour_. I laughed at her funny way of saying things, but yet something in her last words made the uneasy feeling come back again. Then my grandmother went on talking in a different tone.