L.T. Meade

How It All Came Round

Hodder & Stoughton, 1883.

In half an hour she found herself in Regent's Park...The whole place was flooded with sunshine. There were no flowers visible; the season had been too bad, and the year was yet too young...Children were running about everywhere. Charlotte loved children. Many an afternoon she had gone into Kensington Gardens for the mere and sole purpose of watching them. Here were children, too, as many as there, but of a different class. Not quite so aristocratic, not quite so exclusively belonging to the world of rank and fashion. The children in Regent's Park were certainly quite as well dressed; but there was some little indescribable thing missing in them, which the little creatures whom Charlotte Harman was most accustomed to notice, possessed

Musing on these differences, Charlotte becomes aware of a group approaching the bench that she shares with a clergyman.

A very small nurse appeared, wheeling a perambulator, while two children ran by her side...The little group were walking past rather more slowly than most of the other groups, for the older boy and girl looked decidedly tired, when suddenly they all stopped; the servant girl opened her mouth until it remained fixed in the form of a round O; the baby raised its arms and crowed; the elder boy and girl uttered a loud shout and ran forward. "Father, father, you here?" said the boy

Charlotte gets into conversation, later visits their house and discovers that the clergyman's wife is a long-lost relative. But past events mean that the reunion is not a happy one, and subsequently the two women arrange to meet in the park to sort things out. At a final chance encounter with the children Charlotte becomes reconciled to what she has learned.