"
"Thank you," she said: "when I go in search of Og's bed I'll take you
with me."
"You could not do better: I have the scent of a sleuth-hound for
antiquities."
As they were speaking a man came and hung up beside the queens and
the iron beds a big white board on which were printed in large black
letters the words, "My Mother and I"--nothing more.
"What _can_ the meaning of that be?" asked Lady Arthur.
"To make you ask the meaning of it," said Mr. Eildon. "I who am
skilled in these matters have no doubt that it is the herald of some
soothing syrup for the human race under the trials of teething." He
was standing at the carriage-door till the train would start, and he
stood aside to let a young lady and a boy in deep mourning enter. The
pair were hardly seated when the girl's eye fell on the great white
board and its announcement. She bent her head and hid her face in her
handkerchief: it was not difficult to guess that she had very recently
parted with her mother for ever, and the words on the board were more
than she could stand unmoved.
Miss Adamson too had been thinking of her mother, the hard-working
woman who had toiled in her little shop to support her sickly husband
and educate her daughter--the kindly patient face, the hands that had
never spared themselves, the footsteps that had plodded so incessantly
to and fro.
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