“Sit down,” he said, “you are a good child, and I shall miss you. But we shall meet again in September, I understand. By the way, I have decided to give you a letter of introduction to the fairy agent at the Cushats. The garden must have one, though I do not happen to know him. I don’t expect you will see very much of him, for you will not be as lonely there as here, and so much left to yourself. Considering that she isn’t a proper fairy godmother, yours seems to do very well by you. Still, it would be nicer for you to have the chance of getting to know another fairy if you could.”
All this while Sweet William had been rummaging in his cupboard. He now drew from it a white Japanese anemone, with its petals tightly shut up. This he handed to Philomène. “Is it the envelope?” she asked, wonderingly.
“No, child,” he replied, “it is the letter. I have written all that is necessary on the inside of the petals, and the anemone will open only when you have found the person for whom it is intended.” Philomène thanked him, and they took a friendly farewell of each other.
It was Lilian Augusta with whom she travelled to the little country station where Godmother was to meet her. She sat bolt-upright in her corner of the carriage, looking at the daisied fields as they sped by; she watched the miniature carts and horses as they toiled along the road below the level of the train, and her spirits were so high that nothing could chill or damp them, not even the drink concocted by Nurse for the journey, a horrible mixture of tea and milk with far too much sugar in it.
The little station of Wyndham-on-Ferry, at which the travellers presently arrived, was altogether too sleepy for this bustling age. The fiery red geraniums in the station-master’s garden nodded drowsily in the hot sun, the solitary porter seemed almost as drowsy as the geraniums, and the only wide-awake creature about the place was a cock that crowed from a neighbouring farmyard. Outside the station Godmother was waiting with the new trap and the white donkey, and Philomène had soon scrambled up on to the seat beside her.
“O Godmother,” she cried, “he really is a dear, with just the same big brown eyes as the donkey in the picture over the schoolroom mantelpiece, and the same long ears laid back.”