The Rector and the Doctor's Family by Margaret Oliphant

When the red gleams of the early sunshine shone into that window from which Nettie had looked out last night, the wintry light came in with agitating revelations not simply upon another morning, but upon a new world. As usual, Nettie's thoughts were expressed in things tangible. She had risen from her sleepless bed while it was still almost dark, and to look at her now, a stranger might have supposed her to be proceeding with her last night's work with the constancy of a monomaniac. Little Freddy sat up in his crib rubbing his eyes and marvelling what Nettie could be about, as indeed anybody might have marvelled. With all those boxes and drawers about, and heaps of personal belongings, what was she going to do? She could not have answered the question without pain; but had you waited long enough, Nettie's object would have been apparent. Not entirely free of that air of agitated haste -- not recovered from the excitement of this discovery, she was relieving her restless activity by a significant rearrangement of all the possessions of the family. She was separating with rapid fingers those stores which had hitherto lain lovingly together common property. For the first time for years Nettie had set herself to discriminate what belonged to herself from the general store; and, perhaps by way of softening that disjunction, was separating into harmonious order the little wardrobes which were no longer to be under her charge. Freddy opened his eyes to see all his own special belongings, articles which he recognised with all the tenacious proprietorship of childhood, going into one little box by themselves in dreadful isolation. The child did not know what horrible sentence might have been passed upon him while he slept. He gazed at those swift inexorable fingers with the gradual sob rising in his poor little breast. That silent tempest heaved and rose as he saw all the well-known items following each other; and when his last new acquisition, the latest addition to his wardrobe, lay solemnly smoothed down upon the top, Freddy's patience could bear no more. Bursting into a long howl of affliction, he called aloud upon Nettie to explain that mystery. Was he going to be sent away? Was some mysterious executioner, black man, or other horrid vision of fate, coming for the victim? Freddy's appeal roused from her work the abdicated family sovereign. "If I'm to be sent away, I shan't go! " cried Freddy. "I'll run off and come back again. I shan't go anywhere unless you go, Nettie. I'll hold on so fast, you can't put me away; and, oh, I'll be good! -- I'll be so good! " Nettie, who was not much given to caresses, came up and put sudden arms round her special nursling. She laid her cheek to his, with a little outbreak of natural emotion. "It is I who am to be sent away! " cried Nettie, yielding for a moment to the natural bitterness. Then she bethought herself of certain thoughts of comfort which had not failed to interject themselves into her heart, and withdrew with a little precipitation, alarmed by the inconsistency -- the insincerity of her feelings. "Get up, Freddy; you are not going away, except home to the colony, where you want to go," she said. "Be good, all the same; for you know you must not trouble mamma. And make haste, and don't be always calling for Nettie. Don't you know you must do without Nettie some time? Jump up, and be a man."

"When I am a man, I shan't want you," said Freddy, getting up with reluctance; "but I can't be a man now. And what am I to do with the buttons if you won't help me? I shall not have buttons like those when I am a man."