“I always knew it wasn’t,” said Bobbie. “Me and Mother and our old gentleman.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s all his doing. Mother wrote and told me you had found out. And she told me what you’d been to her. My own little girl!” They stopped a minute then.
And now I see them crossing the field. Bobbie goes into the house, trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the right words to “tell Mother quite quietly” that the sorrow and the struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come home.
I see Father walking in the garden, waiting—waiting. He is looking at the flowers, and each flower is a miracle to eyes that all these months of spring and summer have seen only flagstones and gravel and a little grudging grass. But his eyes keep turning towards the house. And presently he leaves the garden and goes to stand outside the nearest door. It is the back door, and across the yard the swallows are circling. They are getting ready to fly away from cold winds and keen frost to the land where it is always summer. They are the same swallows that the children built the little clay nests for.
Now the house door opens. Bobbie’s voice calls:—
“Come in, Daddy; come in!”
He goes in and the door is shut. I think we will not open the door or follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy roses and St. John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted now.
Colophon
The Railway Children
was published in 1906 by
E. Nesbit.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
David Grigg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1999 by
Les Bowler and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
La Gare de Saint-Lazare,
a painting completed in 1877 by
Claude Monet.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The first edition of this ebook was released on
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Uncopyright
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