the primroses. Why won’t you let me go, mamma?” And just then my eyes happened to fall on the little piece of black sticking-plaster that Winny had put on my thumb only two evenings before, when she had hurt it without meaning. “Mamma, mamma,” I cried, “I can’t stay here without Winny.”

It all seemed to come into my mind then what it would really be to be without her, and I cried and cried till my face ached with crying. I can’t remember much of that day, nor of several days. I did not get ill, the fever did not come to me somehow, but I seemed to get stupid with missing Winny. Mamma and my aunties talked to me, but it did not do any good. They could not tell me the only things I cared to hear—all about Winny, what she was doing, what lessons she would have, if she would always wear white frocks, and all sorts of things, that I must have sadly pained them by asking. For I did not then at all understand about death. I thought that Winny, my pretty Winny, just as I had known her, had gone to Heaven. I did not know that her dear little body had been laid to rest in the quiet churchyard, and that it was her spirit, her pure happy spirit, that had gone to heaven. It was not for a long time after that, that I was old enough to understand at all, and even now it is hard to understand. Mamma says even quite big, and very, very clever people find it hard, and that the best way is to trust to God to explain it afterwards. But still I like to think about it, and I like to think of what my aunties told me of the days Winny was ill—how happy and patient she was, how she seemed to “understand” about going, and how she loved to have fresh wreaths of primroses about her all the time she was ill.

I am a big girl now—nearly twelve. I am a good deal bigger than Winny was when she died, even Blanche is now as big as she was—is that not strange to think of? Perhaps I may live to be quite, quite an old woman—that seems stranger still. But even if I do I shall never forget Winny. I shall know her dear face again, and she will know mine—I feel sure she will, in that happy country where she has gone. But I will never again say “good night” to my Winny, for in that country “there is no night—neither sorrow nor weeping.”