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than what they told her. So now she rose late, only when the children were passing whistling to each other under her bedroom window on their way to school, and she breakfasted in her dressing-gown, and she sat by a closed window (with a fire until summer was indubitably come) and watched the petty pageant of the streets while she stitched and stitched and dreamed in all the unreality of occupied idleness.
    For, although the books assumed her to be an invalid, they offered some compensation at least in the array of garments they prescribed as necessary for the ‘little stranger’—that horrible expression of which they made such free use. It was not a horrible expression to Agatha; she would have called it a genteel necessary circumlocution if it had ever occurred to her to employ such an exotic phrase. The ‘little stranger’, then, had to have a myriad garments—binders yards and yards long, matinée jackets, veils and shawls and a christening gown, socks and gloves, daygowns and nightgowns of flannel exquisitely embroidered in silk—and Agatha made every blessed thing herself, stitching away patiently by the window. She stitched and stitched, but of the dreams she wove in with the silk it would not be right to tell.
    She came to know that side street and its habitués so well. There were rag-and-bone men, each chanting his call in his own particular manner; there were the milkmen on the eleven o’clock round, and the smart baker’s cart, and the butcher’s dog-cart drawn by a showy chestnut sadly over-driven by the butcher’s greasy-haired son; there was the insurance agent, frock-coated and bowler·hatted, and the fruitsellers and knife-grinders. On three afternoons a week organ grinders came, one of them with a shivering monkey in a red coat, and another, who was a real Italian, bronzed and handsome with marvellously white teeth, who sang ‘O Sole Mio’ so sentimentally that Agatha always opened the window and threw him a penny. And besides all these there were the children—oh, the children! Every house had its two or three, who came trotting home to dinner at twelve and back again to school at two, and down the street once more at half past four. Agatha knew them all, the big ones and the little ones, the late ones and the early ones, the good ones and the naughty ones. Big sisters often had one or two to escort, and more than once during those six months Agatha watched the rise of a new independence when some baby boy would suddenly decide that big sisters were no longer of use to him and would find his own way to school, not quite sure of himself either, with an occasional look round to see that the sister was not unattainably out of reach. Agatha could not have watched with greater interest the beginning of a new planet.
    Some there were to whom the grim flagstones of the pavement were friendly and sociable, for it was a great game to walk to school entirely on the lines between them; and just outside No. 37 there were three successive very wide flagstones, much wider than the ordinary six-year-old could stride, and Agatha would find herself leaning forward in great excitement to see whether this little boy or that little girl would accomplish the perilous passage in safety. There were naughty little boys who played ‘knocking down ginger’—knocking at nearly every door in the street and running away before they opened. Agatha’s heart used to beat quite fast in case they were caught, but they never were. Tops were all the rage when Agatha first came to No. 37, and they were succeeded by marbles and skipping-ropes (according to sex), and cherrystones and little balls and one or two cricket bats made their appearance before football came into its own again. There was one dreadful incident when a prized tennis ball rolled down a drain, and Agatha watched palpitating while the grating was prised up and two small urchins of seven hung on to the legs of another small urchin of nine while he lowered