“Maisie, I have only just discovered where you were. I had been quite frantic with worry until Mrs. French suggested you were upstairs.”

“I am sorry, Mama,” and I took her hand. “I took tea with Miss Grange.”

“Yes, Maisie, but when I went to look for you this past hour, your book lay on the window seat, and you had vanished.”

I smiled up into her worried face. “I would not have disappeared before telling you.”

Her agitation seemed to increase with my smile, and drawing me to her side, she wrapped an arm around my shoulders and walked me into her room. There, she sat me down in front of the mirror, her hands on either shoulder. Surprised, I looked up at her in the glass, but she did not catch my eye, intent as she was on drawing the long pins from my hair. I searched her face as she pulled each pin, carefully lining one by one upon the dressing table, her one hand gently shaking out my curls as they fell free; and because I knew she meant to tell me something, but could not at present, I closed my eyes and gave over to the comfort of my mother’s hands. After a time, she began to brush out my hair—almost languorously, one hand on my forehead, pulling me softly back into her chest, each slow stroke catching my long hair and moving down from root to tip. For several minutes, she brushed in silence, and I was lulled by the quiet and by her familiar scent backward into a childish feeling I had long forgotten, when all the world was my mama. My head leaning into her, her hands all throughout my hair, and no sound but that of bristles catching air, I drifted past myself, my mother, our room; so when she spoke finally, it was as though she called to me from another country.

“You are all I have in the world, child.”

She pressed her cheek to the top of my head and stopped brushing. For a moment, she rested there, and then she stepped away from me and over to my bed, where Jessie had laid my evening dress. I watched in the mirror as she fiddled with the lace at the cuffs, and I understood that she, too, had drifted, but it had been too far for her past comfort, and we were now returned.

“Will you choose a ribbon for my hair, Mama?” I turned from the table and walked also to the bed, pulling at the buttons at my back as I did so. She smiled an answer, unbuttoning what I could not reach, and then walked into the dressing room. Swiftly, I drew off my clothing down to my chemise and splashed water on my cheeks and arms. The water invigorated, calling the life back into my lulled senses.