The children

Before mounting to Mrs. Sellars’s the next morning Boyne went down to the Pension Rosenglüh to gather what farther details he could of the strange flight of the little Wheaters.

As he reached the pension gate he was met by Miss Scope, looking more than commonly gaunt and ravaged, but as brightly resolute as her fellow-conspirator. Her gray cotton glove enfolded Boyne’s hand in an unflinching grasp, and she exclaimed at once how providential it was that they should have caught him still at Cortina. She added that she had been on the look-out for him, as both Judith and Terry were still asleep, and she was sure he’d agree that they had better not be disturbed, after all they’d been through; especially as Terry was still feverish. The other children, he gathered, had already breakfasted, and been shepherded out by Nanny and the nursemaid to the downs above the valley; and meanwhile perhaps Mr. Boyne would come in and have a chat.

The word seemed light for the heavy news he was prepared to hear; but he suspected that Miss Scope, like the Witch of Atlas, was used to racing on the platforms of the wind, and laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind. At any rate, her sturdy composure restored his own balance, and made him glad of the opportunity to hear her version of the adventure before his next encounter with Judith.

Miss Scope was composed, as she always was—he was soon to learn—in real emergencies. She had been through so many that they seemed to her as natural and inevitable as thunder-storms or chicken-pox—as troublesome, but no more to be fussed about. Nevertheless, she did not underrate the gravity of the situation: to do so, he suspected, would have robbed it of its savour. There had been cataclysms before—times when Judy had threatened to go off and disappear with all the children—but till now she had never even attempted to put her threats into execution. “And now she’s carried it off with a master hand,” Miss Scope declared in a tone of grim triumph.

But carried it where to? That was the question Boyne could not help putting. He was sure Judith had been masterly—but where was it all going to lead? Had any of them taken that into account, he asked?

Well, Miss Scope had to own that their departure had been too precipitate for much taking into account. It had to be then or never—she had seen that as clearly as Judy and Terry. The fact that Terry was with them showed how desperate the situation was—

“Desperate? Really desperate?”

“Oh, Mr. Boyne! If you’d been through it twice before, as my poor children have....”

Listening to the details of her story, he agreed that it must indeed have been awful, and ended by declaring that he did not question Judith’s reasons; but now that the first step in the mutiny was taken, how did Miss Scope imagine that they were going to keep it up? In short, what did they mean to do when they were found out?

“I think Judith counts very much on your intervention. That’s the reason she was so anxious to find you still here. And of course she hopes there’ll be time—time to consider, to choose a course of action. She believes it will be some days before we’re found out, as you put it. I daresay she’s told you that she left a letter ... Mr. Boyne,” said Miss Scope, interrupting herself with her sternest accent, “I hope you don’t think that, in ordinary circumstances, I should ever condone the least deceit. The children will tell you that on that point I’m inexorable. But these were not ordinary circumstances.” She cleared her throat, and brought out: “Judith said in the letter that we’d sailed for America. She thinks her father will hurry there to find them, and in that way we shall gain a little time, for the steamer they’re supposed to be on is not due in New York for ten days.”

The plan seemed puerile, even for so immature a mind as Judith’s; but Boyne did not raise that point. He merely said: “I hope so. But meanwhile what are you all going to live on? It costs something to feed such an army.”

Miss Scope’s countenance turned from sallow to white. Her eyes forsook his face, as they did when she talked of Terry, and she brought out, hesitatingly: “Judith, I understand, has means....”

“Poor woman!” Boyne thought. “I believe she’s plumped in all her savings.—I see,” he said. He was filled with a sudden loathing of all the wasteful luxury, the vanity and selfishness and greed, out of which this poor pale flower of compassion had sprung. “I see,” he repeated. He stood up, and held out his hand. “You’re their real mother. If there’s anything on earth I can do—to the limit of my small capacity—.” A tear ran down the furrows of Miss Scope’s averted cheek. He knew it by the hasty dab of her cotton hand. “I know—I know—. Oh, Mr. Boyne, it’s providential, our finding you.”

He pressed her wet glove hard, and assured her that she could count on him. He would go off now, he added, to reflect further on the problem, and come back later, when Judy and Terry were awake.

It was after eleven when he reached the châlet; but luckily no long excursion had been planned for that morning. Mrs. Sellars had told him the night before that she had letters to write, and should not expect him early. When he approached the little house in its clearing of emerald turf he saw her on the balcony, her writing-materials on a table at her elbow. But she was leaning on the rail, looking down the path by which he always came. He waved his hand, and she answered with a welcoming gesture. “Come up—I’m deep in papers,” she called down cheerily.

“I came last night, but your lights were out, and I was afraid of the cook,” he laughed, taking her in his arms as she went to meet him. The day was warm, and she had put on a thin white dress which gave her a springlike look. Her complexion too had a morning freshness, through which the blood ran up to his kiss. “But not afraid of me?” she questioned.

“Of you? I like that! You deserted me; it’s you who ought to be afraid. I’ve come to make a row, you know.”

“You ought to have come to thank me for my tact. I saw you’d run across old friends, and slipped out of the way.”

“I’d run across one young friend—Judith Wheater. When I came back to tell you about it you’d gone.”

Her eyes lit up with curiosity and interest. “Your famous little Judith? Really? Why, you always speak of her as such a child—I shouldn’t have guessed....”

“You said yourself last night how young she looked—”

“Yes; awfully young; but still—grown up.”

“Well, she’s not grown up. She’s a child—a child tremendously to be pitied. I want to tell you all about it. I want your help and your advice. You don’t know what a quandary I’m in.”

She had gone back to her seat on the balcony, and he dropped into the chair beside her. As he spoke her colour flickered up again, and she smiled a little uncertainly. “A quandary—about that child?” The smile faded, and her colour with it. “Martin, you don’t mean ... you can’t...?”

He stared, perplexed, and then burst out laughing. “That the quandary’s mine—about little Judith? Bless you, what an idea! Why, she’s hardly out of the nursery.” He laughed again, partly to bridge over his surprise and her constraint. It was incredible, what farfetched delusions the most sensible women took up with, at the very moment when one wanted them to look at a question like a man! “This is a very different business,” he went on. “Not in the least sentimental, but merely squalid. The Wheater ménage has gone to smash again, and Judy’s bolted with all the children, to try to prevent their being separated, as they are whenever there’s a new deal.”

Mrs. Sellars sat looking at him with wide eyes and parted lips. The situation was evidently too new to her to be at once intelligible, and she repeated vaguely: “Bolted—bolted from whom?”

“From Joyce and Wheater. Gone clean away, without any warning.”

She was again silent, her eyes as it were fixed on this statement, which seemed to carry her no farther toward comprehension.

“But bolted with whom? They can’t have gone away all by themselves?”

“The governess is with them, and the two nurses. In a crisis like this they all stand by Judith. I’ve just been talking with the governess, and she entirely approves. You see, they’ve been through this kind of thing before.”

“Through the running away?”

“No, but through what led up to it. The last time, it appears, Judith told her parents that if they were divorced again she meant to go off with all the children, rather than have them separated from each other as they were before. You see, whenever a smash comes the children are divided up among the ex-parents, and some of them are pretty rotten, I imagine—a blackmailing Italian prince, a rather notorious movie star, and Lord knows who besides. Not to speak of the new elements to be introduced, if Joyce and Wheater both marry again, as I’ve no doubt they will, in no time.”

Mrs. Sellars, her chin resting on her hand, sat listening in a silence still visibly compounded of bewilderment and disgust. For a minute after Boyne had ceased speaking she did not move or look up. At last she said, in a low voice: “It’s all too vile for belief.”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “And it’s all true.”

“The horrors those children must know about—”

“It’s to save them from more horrors that Judith has carried them away.”

“I see—I see. Poor child!” Her face melted into pity. “Just at first it was all too new to me. But now I’m beginning to understand. And I suppose she came here hoping you would help her?”

“I suppose she didn’t have much time to think or choose, but vaguely remembered I was here, as her letter showed.”

“But the money? Where in the world did they get the money? You can’t transport a nursery-full of children from one place to another without paying for it.”

Boyne hesitated a moment; but he felt he must not betray Miss Scope, and merely answered that he hadn’t had time to go into all that yet, but supposed that in an easy-going extravagant household like the Wheaters’ there were always some funds available, the more so as preparations were already being made to send the children off to the mountains.

“Well, it’s all hideous and touching and crazy. Where are the poor little things—at your hotel?” Mrs. Sellars had gone indoors, and was picking up her hat and sunshade. “I should like you to take me down at once to see them.”

Boyne was touched by the suggestion, but secretly alarmed at what might happen if Mrs. Sellars were exposed unprepared to the simultaneous assault of all the little Wheaters. He explained that Judith had taken her flock to an inexpensive pension in the village, and that the younger children, when he had called there, were already away on the downs, and Judith and Terry still sleeping off their emotions. Should he go down again, he asked, and bring Judith back alone to the châlet? “You’d better see her first without the others. You might find the seven of them rather overwhelming.”

Seven? Mrs. Sellars confessed she hadn’t realised that there were actually seven. She agreed that it would be perhaps better that she should first see Judith without her brothers and sisters, and proposed that Boyne should invite her to come back with him to the châlet to lunch. “If you think she won’t be too frightened of a strange old woman?” The idea of Judith’s being frightened of anything or anybody amused Boyne, but he thought it charming of Mrs. Sellars to suggest it, and was glad, after all, that she was there to support and advise him. When she had had a quiet talk with Judith he felt sure she would be on the children’s side; and perhaps her practical vision might penetrate farther than his into the riddle of what was to be done for them.

“If only,” he said to himself, “Judith doesn’t begin by saying something that will startle her”; and he thought of warning Mrs. Sellars not to expect a too great ingenuousness in his young friend. Then he reflected that such a warning might unconsciously prejudice her against the girl, and decided that it would be wiser to trust to Judith’s natural charm to overcome anything odd in her conversation. If there were hints to be given, he concluded, there would be less risk in giving them to Judith.

But the utility of giving hints in that quarter became equally dubious at first sight of her. Refreshed and radiant after her night’s rest, and unusually pretty in her light linen frock, and a spreading hat with a rosy lining, Judith received him at the gate of the pension in an embrace which sent her hat flying among the currant-bushes, and exposed her rumpled head and laughing eyes to his close inspection. “You look like a pansy this morning,” he said, struck by the resemblance of her short pointed oval and velvet-brown eyes to the eager inquisitive face of the mountain flower. But Judith was no gardener, and rejected the comparison with a grimace. “How horrid of you! Nasty wired things in wreaths at funerals! I don’t feel a bit as if I were at a funeral. It’s so jolly to be here, and to have found you. You’ve come to say you’ll lunch with us, haven’t you? The children will be mad with joy. It was partly because I promised them we’d find you here that they agreed to come. Blanca and Zinnie unsettled them at first—they’re always afraid of missing some excitement if they have a row with mother. But I told them we’d have lots more excitement with you.” She was hanging on his arm, and drawing him up the path to the house.

“I must tell the landlady you’re coming to lunch. Scopy’s upstairs with Terry, and she told me to be sure not to forget, so that the cook could give us something extra.” By this time they were in the little sitting-room, which smelt of varnish and dried edelweiss, and had a stuffed eagle perched above the stove. Judith sat down on the slippery sofa, and dragged Boyne to a seat at her side. “And first, I was to ask you what pudding you’d particularly like.”

“Oh, bless you, any pudding. But about lunch—”

She drew herself up, and tossed him an arch smile. “Or perhaps you’re here incog., with a lady, and would rather not come? I told Scopy I shouldn’t wonder—”

“Nonsense, Judith; how absurd—”

“Why absurd? Why shouldn’t you be here with a lady? Vous êtes encore très bien, mon cher....” She drew her deep lids half shut, and slanted an insinuating glance at him.

“Don’t talk like a manicure, child. As a matter of fact, I have an old friend here who wants very much to see you, and who kindly suggested—”

“An old lady-friend?”

“Yes.”

“As old as Scopy?”

“No; probably not as old as your mother, even. I only meant—”

“But if she’s younger than mother, how can you say she’s old? Is she prettier, too?” Judith broke in searchingly.

“I don’t know, really; I haven’t thought—”

“Well, I don’t believe she’s as well-dressed. Unless, perhaps, you think Joyce’s clothes are sometimes just a shade too—”

“I haven’t thought about that either. What I mean by ‘old’ is that Mrs. Sellars and I have been friends for years. She’s living in a châlet on the hill above the hotels; and she wants me to bring you up to lunch with her today.”

“Me—only me?” Judith questioned, visibly surprised.

Boyne smiled. “Well, my dear, I’m sure she would have liked to invite you all, Chip included; but her house is tiny and couldn’t possibly take in the whole party. So, to avoid invidious distinctions, why not come by yourself and make her acquaintance? I want you awfully to know her, for no one can give you better advice than she can.”

Judith drew herself up stiffly and her face became a blank. “I don’t want anybody’s advice but yours, Martin. But of course I’ll go if you want me to.”

“It’s not a question of what I want. But you may be sure if my advice is any good it will be because I’ve consulted Mrs. Sellars. Two’s not too many to get you out of this predicament. I sometimes think you don’t realise what an awful row you’re all in for.”

“If she’s not as old as mother, and you’ve never noticed how she’s dressed, you must be in love with her,” Judith went on, as if his last words had not made the least impression on her.

“I don’t see what difference it makes if I am or not,” he retorted, beginning to lose his temper. “The point is that she happens to be one of the kindest and most sensible women I know—”

“That’s what men always think,” said Judith thoughtfully. She drew back to study him again through half-closed lids. “It’s a wonderful thing to be in love,” she murmured; and then continued with a teasing smile: “Blanca’s ever so much sharper than I am. She said: ‘Why’s Martin in such an awful hurry to rush away from Venice, if he isn’t slipping off on the quiet to meet a friend?’ I suppose,” she added, with a fall in her voice, and a corresponding droop of the lips, “it was awfully stupid of me to blunder in on you like this, and you’re racking your brains to think how you can get rid of us all, and keep out of a row with father and mother.”

Boyne, half-exasperated and half-touched, as he so often was in his talks with her, and especially when he knew she wished to give him pain, laid his hand reproachfully on hers. “Look here, Judith, I could shake you when you talk such drivel. The only thing I’m racking my brains about is how to help you to get what you want. To keep you all together, as you are now, and yet not let your father and mother think that I’ve had anything to do with this performance. You’re quite right; I do want to stay on good terms with them, because if I do I may succeed in persuading them that, whatever happens, they’ve no right to separate you children again. If I do that I shall have done my best for you. But I don’t see my way to it yet, and that’s why I want you to come and make friends with Mrs. Sellars.”

To his surprise she listened in an attentive silence, and, when he had ended, lifted to his the face of an obedient child. “Of course I’ll do what you want, Martin. But don’t you think your friend would perhaps understand better if I had Nanny bring up Chip to see her after lunch?”

“Bless you—of course she would,” he agreed enthusiastically; and she thereupon proposed that before they started he should come upstairs and see Terry.

Seeing Terry, Boyne had to admit, was the surest way of attaching one, body and soul, to the cause of the little Wheaters. Whatever Mrs. Sellars thought of Judith—a question of obvious uncertainty—there could be no doubt as to what she would think of Terry.

There had been moments during the morning when Boyne did not see how any good will on either part could bridge the distance between Mrs. Sellars’s conception of life, and Judith Wheater’s experience of it; but between Mrs. Sellars and Terry there would be nothing to explain or bridge over. Their minds would meet as soon as their eyes did. “I’ll bring her down to see him after lunch,” Boyne decided.

There was no hope of Terry’s being up that day. The excitement of the flight, and the heat and fatigue of the journey, had used up his small surplus of strength, and he could only lie staring at Boyne with eager eyes, and protest that he knew the air of Cortina would put him all right before long. Scopy had already had the doctor in, and administered suitable remedies, and the patient’s temperature had dropped to nearly normal. “If only father and mother will let us stay here I’m sure I shall be patched up this time. And you’ll be here for a bit to look after the children, won’t you, Martin?”

Boyne said he would stay as long as he could, and at any rate not leave till the little Wheaters’ difficulty with their parents was on the way to adjustment. He pointed out that negotiations would no doubt be necessary, and Terry promptly rejoined: “That’s just why Judy and I decided to come here. We knew that if we could get hold of you, you’d back us up, and help us to make some kind of terms with father and mother.” His eyes fixed his friend’s with a passionate insistence. “You see, Martin, it won’t do, separating us again—it really won’t. We’re not going to get any sort of education at this rate. And as for manners! The children have all been completely demoralised since Zinnia’s visit. Now they’ve heard of Buondelmonte’s marriage, and the steps have gone off their base too; and as for Blanca she thinks of nothing but dressing-up and flirtation.... As soon as things go wrong between father and mother the children seem to feel it in the air; even before the actual fighting begins, they all get out of hand. Zinnie gave Bun a black eye the other day because he said he was going to be a Prince again, and live in his father’s palace in Rome, and have his own Rolls ... a child who hardly knows his letters!” Terry concluded with a gesture of contempt.

“I know, old man. It’s all wrong,” Boyne agreed, “and something’s got to be done, and done soon. That’s what I’m going to try to make your father and mother see. Meanwhile you must make the most of this respite to get a good rest. I promise I’ll do what I can when the time comes.”

“Oh, you needn’t promise,” Terry said, letting his head sink back contentedly on the pillows.

On the way up the hill with Judith, Boyne was able to gather some of the details she had been too tired and excited to impart the night before. Miss Scope’s confidences were always in the nature of sombre generalizations. When it came to particulars, she retreated behind professional secrecy; and Boyne had not liked to force her defences. Besides, he knew that no such scruples would hamper Judith, who saw life only in particulars. But, after all, there was nothing very unexpected in Judith’s story. As she said, it was always the same old row over again. As soon as Zinnia Lacrosse had cast a covetous eye on Gerald Ormerod, Joyce had decided that she could not live without him. The thought of his dining every night at the Lido with the Wrenches and the Duke of Mendip, while she and Wheater sat alone on the deck of the “Fancy Girl,” or made the most of such mediocre guests as they could collect, was too much for a high-spirited woman; and Joyce had suddenly requested her husband to sack the tutor. Wheater, surprised, had protested that Terry liked him (and Terry did—he was very jolly, and a good teacher, Judith impartially admitted); whereupon Joyce had declared that if Ormerod wasn’t sent away at once she intended to divorce Wheater and marry him. Wheater, of course, was furious, and there had been, in Judith’s language, an all-round circus, complicated by the fact that what Gerald really wanted was to marry her—

“What—what? Marry you? Have you all of you gone crazy?” Boyne found himself indignantly repeating.

Judith smiled. “I’m not crazy. And I’m nearly sixteen. And I suppose I’m a nairess.” (She pronounced the word as she wrote it.) “But you don’t imagine I’d leave the children, do you? Besides, Terry says it would be ridiculous to marry till I can learn how to spell.”

“My God—I should say it would,” cried Boyne furiously. What on earth would come of it, he asked himself, if she opened the conversation with Mrs. Sellars on this note? “Judith, look here—.”

“But I don’t know, after all,” she went on, in a reflective tone. “Gerald says some of the greatest people never could spell. Napoleon couldn’t—or Madame de Sévigné—and Shakespeare signed his name differently every time.”

“I see you’ve taken a course in history since I left,” Boyne sneered; to which she responded with simplicity: “No; but he told me that one day when he found me crying because of my awful spelling.”

“Well, you’re quite right to cry about your spelling. And Terry’s quite right to say that the first thing you want is to have some sort of an education, all of you.”

“Perhaps, then, it would have been better for me to marry Gerald,” she rejoined, with a return of her uncanny impartiality. “But no,” she interrupted herself; “I never could have kept the children if I had; so what’s the use?”

“Well, here we are,” Boyne broke in nervously.

“Why, you poor child, how young you are, after all!” Mrs. Sellars exclaimed, swaying forward to drop an impulsive kiss on Judith’s cheek. Boyne’s first thought was, how young she looked herself, in her thin black dress, her auburn head bent like an elder sister’s above Judith’s; then how much too young Judith was to be conciliated by that form of greeting.

Judith looked at her hostess with a smile. “Young for what?” she asked, with an ominous simplicity.

“Why—for all your responsibilities,” the other answered, checked in her premeditated spontaneity.

Judith was still smiling: a small quiet smile from which the watchful Boyne augured no good.

“I suppose I ought to be flattered,” she said. “I know that at your age and mother’s it’s thought awfully flattering to be called young. But, you see, I’m not sixteen yet, so it’s nothing extraordinary to me.”

“Your being so young makes it extraordinarily kind of you to come and see an old lady like me,” Mrs. Sellars smiled back, taking nervous refuge in platitudes.

Judith considered her with calm velvety eyes. “Oh, but I wanted to come. Martin says you’ll be a friend; and we need friends badly.”

Mrs. Sellars’s eyes at once softened. “Martin’s quite right. I’ll be as good a friend as you’ll let me. I’m so glad you’ve come to share my picnic lunch. And Martin will have told you how sorry I was not to have room for the whole party in this tiny house.”

“Well,” said Judith, “he thought you’d find us rather overwhelming—”; but Mrs. Sellars laughed this away as an unauthorized impertinence of her old friend’s.

On the whole, things were beginning better than the old friend had expected. He only hoped Rose wouldn’t mind Judith’s chucking down her hat on the sitting-room sofa, and turning to the glass above the mantelpiece to run her fingers through her tossed hair. Once at table, Mrs. Sellars led the talk to the subject of the little Wheaters, whose names she had cleverly managed to master, and whose acquaintance she expressed the wish to make at the earliest opportunity, “steps” and all. “For I assure you,” she added, “I’m not as easily overwhelmed as Martin seems to think.”

Judith was always at her best when she was talking of the children, and especially of Terry, whose name Mrs. Sellars had spoken with a sympathy which brought a glow to the girl’s cheek. “Oh, Terry’s far and away the best of us; you’ll love Terry. If only he could have half a chance. I don’t mean about his health; father and mother have really done all they could about that. But he’s never had any proper education, and he isn’t strong enough yet to go to school.” She went on, forgetting herself and her habit of being on the defensive, carried away by the need to explain Terry, to put him in the handsomest possible light before this friend of Martin’s, who was so evidently a person of standards and principles—like Terry himself. It was just another bit of poor Terry’s bad luck, she pursued; for ever so long he’d been begging and imploring their parents to let him have a good tutor, like other boys of his age who weren’t strong enough for school; and finally they had understood, and agreed that he couldn’t be left any longer to Scopy and the nurses; and then, when the tutor was finally found, and everything working so well, Joyce had to take it into her head to marry him. Didn’t Mrs. Sellars agree that it was a particularly rotten piece of luck?

Yes; Mrs. Sellars did agree. Only, Boyne saw from the curve of her lips, “luck” was not precisely the noun she would have used, nor “rotten” the adjective.

“But surely it’s just a passing whim of—of your mother’s. When it comes to the point, she won’t break up everything in order to marry this young man.”

Judith’s eyes widened. “Well, what can mother do—if she’s in love with him?”

Mrs. Sellars lowered her lids softly, as if she were closing the eyes of a dead self. “Why, she could ... she could ... think of all of you, my dear.”

“Oh, she’ll do that,” Judith rejoined. “She has already. She and father are fighting over us now. That’s why we bolted. Hasn’t Martin told you?”

“I think Martin felt he’d rather have you tell me about it yourself—that is, as much as you care to,” said Mrs. Sellars, with tactful evasiveness.

Judith pondered, her brows gathering in a puzzled frown. “I don’t know that there’s anything more to tell. I brought the children away so that we shouldn’t be separated again. If children don’t look after each other, who’s going to do it for them? You can’t expect parents to, when they don’t know how to look after themselves.”

“Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Sellars. With an impulsive movement she put her hand on Judith’s. “Just say that to your mother as you’ve said it to me, and she’ll never give you up for anybody.”

Judith’s frown relaxed, and her eyebrows ran up incredulously. “She has before, you know. What are you to do when you fall in love? That’s one thing I never mean to do,” she announced, in a decisive tone. “Besides, you know,” she went on, “one does get used to children. I suppose you’ve never had any, have you?” Mrs. Sellars made a faint sign of negation. “Oh, well,” Judith continued encouragingly, “I daresay it’s not too late. But if you’d had all of us on your hands, and the three steps besides, you’d probably take us for granted by this time. Not that mother isn’t fond of us—only she has these heart-storms. That’s what poor Doll Westway used to call them. And she knew—”

Mrs. Sellars laid down the spoon with which she was absently stirring her coffee. “Doll Westway—?”

Judith’s face lit up. “You knew her?”

“No,” said Mrs. Sellars, in a tone of rejection acutely familiar to Boyne, but obviously unremarked by the girl.

“She was my very best friend,” Judith went on. “You never saw anybody so lovely to look at. In tea-rose bathing tights—”

“My dear,” Mrs. Sellars interrupted, “don’t you think it seems a pity to sit indoors in such weather? If you’ve finished your coffee, shall we move out on the balcony? Martin, do find the cigarettes.” Her sweetness suffused them like a silvery icing. Judith, obviously puzzled, rose to follow her, and Boyne distributed cigarettes with a savage energy. Oh, damn it, what had gone wrong again now?

But whatever had gone wrong was, for the moment at any rate, set right by the appearance of a blue-veiled nurse who was conducting a rosy little boy up the slope beneath the balcony. “Hullo! This way—here I am!” Judith joyously signalled to the pair; and Mrs. Sellars, leaning over the railing at her side, instantly declared: “Here’s somebody too beautiful not to be the celebrated Chip.”

Yes; it was clever of Judith to have arranged that Chipstone should appear at that moment. To a childless woman the sight of that armful of health and good humour must be at once a pang and a balm. Mrs. Sellars’s eyes met Boyne’s, smiling, trembling, and his signalled back: “Damn Aunt Julia.” Chipstone had already filled the air with his immovable serenity. They had gone back into the sitting-room to greet him, and he settled himself Buddha-like on Mrs. Sellars’s knee, and laughed with satisfaction at the sight of Judy and Martin and Nanny grouped admiringly before him. Whatever came Chip’s way seemed to turn into something as fresh as new milk with the bubbles on it.

“Oh, Chip’s a good enough fellow,” said Judith, fondly disparaging. “But wait till you see Terry....”

“Terry couldn’t come; but the rest of us have,” announced a sharp little voice outside the door.

“Good gracious! If it isn’t Zinnie!” Judith jumped up in a rush of indignation; but before she could reach the door it had opened on the self-possessed figure of her little step-sister, behind whose fiery mop appeared the dark bobbing heads of Bun and Beechy.

“Well, if ever—I never did! Susan swore to me she’d never let ’em out of her sight while we was away,” Nanny ejaculated, paling under Judith’s wrathful glance.

“She never did, neither,” said Zinnie composedly. “She watched us almost all the way; but we could run faster than her, ’cos she’s got a shoe’t hurts her, ’n’ so after a while she had to give up chasing us. Didn’t she?” This was flung back to the “steps” for corroboration.

But a masterly somersault had already introduced Bun to the centre front, where he remained head down, bare legs and sandal-soles in air; and Beechy had rushed up to Mrs. Sellars and flung her passionate arms about Chipstone. “Oh, my Cheepo, we thought we’d losted you, and you were dead,” she joyfully wailed; and Chip received her pæan with a rosy grin.

“Yes, ’n’ Judy hadn’t ought to of sneaked away and left us all like that, ’n’ not said anything ’bout coming here, but only ’ranged for Chip to come and see you, when he’s the youngest of the bunch—ought she of?” Zinnie appealed indignantly to Mrs. Sellars; who replied that it evidently didn’t seem fair, but she must take the blame to herself for living in such a small house that she hadn’t been able to invite them all to lunch because the dining-room wouldn’t have held them. “And I suppose,” she concluded diplomatically, “Chipstone was chosen to represent you because he takes up the least room.”

“No, he doesn’t, either; I do!” shouted Bun, swiftly reversing himself and facing Mrs. Sellars in a challenging attitude. “I can crawl through a croky hoop, and I can—”

“You can’t hold your tongue, and Chip can, and that’s why I brought him, and not the rest of you,” cried Judith, administering a shake to Bun, while Nanny seized upon Beechy to stifle her incipient howl of sympathy.

“Oh, these dreadful children—.” It was another voice at the door, this time so discreetly pitched, so sweetly deprecating, that Mrs. Sellars instinctively rose to receive a visitor who seemed as little used as herself to noisy company.

“I am so sorry—.” Blanca was in the room now, slim, white-frocked, imperturbable, with an air of mundane maturity which made Judith seem like her younger sister.

“Poor Susan told me they’d run away from her when they found Nanny was coming here with Chip, and I rushed after them, but couldn’t catch them. I’m sorry, but it wasn’t my fault.” Prettily breathless, she excused herself to Judith; but her long lashes were busy drawing Mrs. Sellars and Boyne into their net. “Darling Martin!” She bestowed on him one of her mother’s most studied intonations. “I’m Terry’s twin,” she explained to Mrs. Sellars.

The latter, at ease with graces so like her own, replied with a smile that, since Terry could not come, she appreciated his sending such a charming delegate. Judith shot a grimace at Boyne, but Blanca, with a sudden rush of sincerity, declared: “Oh, but when you’ve seen Terry you won’t care for any of the rest of us.”

“Yes, she will; she’ll care for Beechy and me because we’re Roman Princes!” Bun shouted, threatening another handspring which a gesture from Judith curtailed.

Zinnie pushed him aside and planted herself firmly in front of their hostess. “My mother could buy ’em all out if she wanted to, ’cos she’s a movie star,” she affirmed in her thin penetrating voice. “But I’d never let her, ’cos we all love each other very much, ’n’ Judy’s made us all swear on Scopy’s book we’d stay together till we got married. I’m probably going to marry Bun.”

At this announcement signs of damp despair revealed themselves on Beechy’s features; but Bun, regardless of the emotions he excited, interposed to say: “My real mother was a lion-tamer; but that don’t matter, ’cos she’s dead.”

Mrs. Sellars had risen to the occasion on one of her quick wing-beats. Games, tea and more games had been improvised with the promptness and skill which always distinguished her in social emergencies; and the afternoon was nearly over when a band of replete and sleepy children took their way home to the Pension Rosenglüh. On the threshold of the châlet Zinnie paused to call up to the balcony: “I s’pose ’f you’d known we were coming you’d have had some presents ready for us—.” A cuff from Judith nipped the suggestion, and the flock was hurried off down the hill, but not too quickly to catch Mrs. Sellars’s response: “Come up to-morrow and you’ll see!”

Mrs. Sellars, however, did not wait till the next day to return the little Wheaters’ visit. Soon after their departure she gathered up an armful of books, selected for Terry’s special delectation, and walked down to the pension with Boyne. The younger children were by this time at supper; but the visitor was introduced to Miss Scope, and conducted by her to Terry’s bedside. Neither Judith nor Boyne accompanied her, since the doctor did not want his patient to see many people till he had recovered from his fatigue. Mrs. Sellars, for this reason, remained only for a few minutes with the little boy, and when she rejoined Boyne, who was waiting for her at the gate, she said simply: “I’m glad I came.” Boyne liked her for knowing that he would guess the rest. He had never had any doubts about this meeting.

When he got back to his hotel he found the telegram which he had been expecting since the morning. “For God’s sake wire at once if children with you and Chipstone all right worried to death cannot understand insane performance police traced them to Padua where they hired motors for Botzen please ship them all back immediately will wire you funds. Wheater.”

“Damn it—well, I’ll have to go and see him myself,” Boyne muttered, crumpling up the paper and jamming it into his pocket. The message had shattered his dream-paradise of a day, and now the sooner the business ahead of him was over the better for everybody. But with a certain satisfaction he concluded, after a glance at the clock: “Too late to wire tonight, anyhow.”

“Here—how was I to answer this?” Boyne challenged Mrs. Sellars that evening, pushing the telegram across the dinner-table, where they had lingered over their wood-strawberries and cream.

She had been charming about the Wheater children after their departure; appreciative of Judith—with a shade of reserve—discerning and tender about Terry, and warmly motherly about the others. It was heart-breaking, the whole business ... and so touching, the way they all turned to Martin for help ... regarding him apparently as their only friend (how well she understood that!) ... But what on earth was he going to do about it? What possible issue did he see?

All through dinner they went in and out of the question, till Boyne, feeling that, thanks to Terry, her sympathy was permanently secured, drew the Wheater telegram from his pocket. Mrs. Sellars scrutinised it thoughtfully.

“When did this come?”

“Just now. I found it when I went back to the hotel.”

She sighed. “Of course the Wheaters were bound to find out within twenty-four hours where they’d gone. Poor little conspirators! I wish we could have kept them a day or two longer ... especially with that boy so overdone....”

“Well, perhaps we can.”

Her eyebrows queried: “How?” But instead of taking this up he said: “You haven’t told me yet what I’m to answer.”

Her mobile brow sketched another query. “What can you answer? Their father’ll come and fetch them if you don’t send them back.”

“I certainly shan’t do that.”

“Shan’t—? Then what?” Her eyes darkened, and she took up the telegram and studied it again; then she lifted a faintly mocking smile to Boyne. “I confess I’m curious to hear your alternative.”

He considered this with a frown of perplexity. “Why should I answer at all?”

“If you don’t, Wheater has only to telephone to your hotel, and find out if you’re still here, and if you’ve been seen about with a party of children.”

“I shan’t be here. I’ll pack off at once—to Pieve di Cadore, or somewhere.”

“And the children?”

“I’ll take them with me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

She received this with a little silken laugh. “Then you’re a child yourself, dear. How long do you suppose it will be before you’re run down? You’ll only be making things worse for the children—and for yourself.”

“Hang myself! But for them—.” He frowned and pondered again. “Well, damn it; perhaps. But what have you got to suggest?”

“That you should persuade Judith to take them straight back, of course. I’m awfully sorry for them all—and Terry especially. But as far as I can see there’s nothing else to do.”

He stood up and began to pace the floor. “I’ll never do that.”

She leaned her white arms on the table and her smile followed his impatient pacings. “Then what?”

“I don’t know. Not yet. Anyhow, I’ve got the night to think it over.”

“All the thinking in the world won’t get you any farther.”

He met her smile with a grin which was almost antagonistic. “I’ve got out of one or two tighter places in my life before now.”

“I’ve no doubt you have,” she returned in her tone of slightly humorous admiration.

There they had dropped the discussion, both too experienced in debate not to feel its uselessness. And the next morning had, after all, told Boyne, without any one’s help, what he intended to do. He decided that his first step was to see Judith; and he was down at the pension before the shutters of her room were unlatched. Miss Scope was summoned to the sitting-room, and he told her that Judith must come down immediately to see him.

“Bad news, Mr. Boyne—oh, I hope not?”

“Well, you didn’t seriously suppose it was going to take Wheater much longer than this to run you down, did you?”

Miss Scope whitened. “Are the police after us?”

“The police?” He burst out laughing. “To arrest you for abduction? If they do, it shall be over my dead body.”

She turned to go, and then paused to face him from the threshold. “Whatever Judith did was done with my knowledge and consent—consent; I don’t say approval,” she declared in an emphatic whisper.

“Of course, of course. But send her down at once, will you please?”

A moment later Judith was there, huddled into a scant poppy-coloured dressing-gown, her hair tumbling thickly over childish eyes still misty with sleep. “What is it, Martin? The police?”

He laughed again, this time more impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous, child. You’re as bad as Scopy. You didn’t really believe your father would have you arrested, did you?”

She met this with another question, “What is he going to do?”

Boyne handed her the telegram, and she flashed back: “You haven’t answered it?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, we’ll have to start at once, I suppose.”

Boyne stared at her, so unprepared for this prompt abdication that the feeling uppermost in him was a sudden sense of flatness. He had come there ready to put up a fight, valiant if unresourceful, and now—

“Couldn’t we catch a steamer at Trieste?” she continued, apparently pursuing some inward train of thought. The unexpected question jerked him back out of his supineness.

“Trieste? Why Trieste?” He stared at her, puzzled. “Where to?”

“Oh, almost anywhere where they can’t reach us too quickly.” As if unconscious of his presence, she continued to brood upon her problem. “Perhaps, do you know, after all, we’d better go to America. Don’t you think so? There’s Grandma Mervin—Joyce’s mother. We might go to her. And meanwhile you can make the Wheaters think we’re still here, and so they won’t be worried, and we shall have time to slip away.”

In spite of himself, Boyne’s first feeling was one of relief that she meant to keep up the struggle. To begin with, it was more like her; and he had reached the point of wanting her at all costs to be like herself. But he kept his wits sufficiently to reply on a note of sarcasm: “Thank you for the part for which I’m cast. But, my poor child, even if you could get away to America without your parents’ knowing it, such journeys cost money, and I don’t suppose—”

“Oh, I’ve oceans of money,” she answered with a startling composure.

“What do you call oceans of money? Scopy’s savings?” he taunted her.

Judith flushed up. “She told you?”

“She told me nothing. I guessed.”

Her head drooped for a moment; then she raised it with a confident smile. “Well, of course I shall pay her back. She’s sure of that. She knows I’m a nairess.”

“Heroic woman! But how far do you expect to go on what she’s contributed?”

This also Judith faced with composure. “Not very—poor dear Scopy! But, you see, I’ve got a lot besides.”

“A lot of money?”

She leaned her rumpled head back against the hard sofa, apparently determined to enjoy his bewilderment for a moment longer before enlightening him. “Don’t you call five thousand dollars a lot of money?” she asked.

Boyne gave a whistle of astonishment, and she nodded softly in corroboration.

“You had five thousand dollars—of your own?”

“No. But I knew where father had them.”

Boyne jumped to his feet, and stood glaring down at her incredulously. “You knew—?”

“Don’t gape at me, Martin. If you like to call it so, I stole the money. He always has a lot about, because it bores him so to write cheques.”

“And you helped yourself—to what you wanted?”

“It was awfully easy. I knew where the key was.” She seemed anxious to disclaim any undeserved credit in the matter. “And, anyhow, I knew part of it was intended for our expenses in the Engadine this summer. So it really wasn’t exactly like stealing—was it?”

Boyne sat down again, this time in a chair on the farther side of the room. There seemed to be something almost maleficent in the proximity of the small scarlet figure with rumpled hair and sleep-misted eyes, curled up defiantly in the sofa corner. “You told your father this, I suppose, in the letter you left for him?”

“Told him I’d taken the money?” She laughed. “If I had, there wouldn’t have been much use in taking it—would there?”

He groaned, and sat silent, his eyes fixed on the carefully scrubbed boards of the floor. For a while he concentrated his whole attention on one of their resinous knots; then, with limbs of lead, he slowly stood up again. “Well, I wash my hands of you—all of you.”

Judith rose also, and went quickly up to him. “Martin,” she said in a frightened voice, “what are you going to do?”

“Do? Nothing. You’d better answer that telegram yourself,” he retorted roughly, shaking off the hand she had put out. He walked across the room, blinked unseeingly at his hat and stick, which he had thrown down on the table, and turned to go out of the door without remembering to pick them up. On the threshold he was checked by Judith’s passionate clutch on his arm. Her lifted face was wet and frightened. “Martin—why don’t you say you think I’m a thief, and have done with it?”

He swung round on her. “I think you’re an unutterable fool. I think the average Andaman islander has a more highly developed moral sense than you.”

“I don’t know who they are. But Doll Westway always used to—”

“Used to what?”

“Go to her mother’s drawer. There wasn’t any other way. They all hate the bother of paying bills—parents do.” She clung to him, her lips still trembling.

“Miss Scope knows about this, I suppose?”

She nodded. “I persuaded her. She hated it awfully—but she saw there was no other way. She’s saved so little herself—because she has a brother who drinks....”

“And Terry? Does Terry know?”

“Oh, Martin! Terry? How could you think it? But you don’t really, do you? You just said that to frighten me. Oh, Martin ... you’ll never tell Terry, will you? I shall die if you do. It doesn’t matter about anybody else....”

He stood silent, suffering her clasp of desperate entreaty, as if a numbness had crept into the arm she held, and yet as if every nerve in it were fire. Something of the same duality was in his brain as he listened. It struck him dumb with the sense of his incapacity. All the forces of pity—and of something closer to the soul than pity—were fighting in him for her. But opposed to them was the old habit of relentless unconditional probity; the working man’s faith in a standard to be kept up, and imposed on others, at no matter what cost of individual suffering. “I can’t let her drift,” was as near as he could come to it....

“Martin, tell me what you want me to do,” she whispered, her lips trembling. His own hardened.

“Sit down at that table and write to your father that you took the money—and why you took it.”

For a while she considered this painfully. “If I don’t,” she finally brought out, “shall you tell Terry?”

He gave her an indignant look. “Of course I shan’t tell Terry!”

“Very well. Then I will.”

Boyne flushed with the suddenness of his triumph, and most of all at the reason for it. “That’s my Judy!”

She coloured too, as if surprised, but her face remained drawn and joyless. “But if I do, the game’s up—isn’t it?”

“The game’s up anyhow, my dear.”

Her colour faded. “You mean you’re really going to give us away?”

He paused, and then said with deliberation: “I’m going to Venice at once to see your father.”

“To tell him we’re here?”

“Of course.”

Her hand fell from his arm, and she stood drooping before him, all the youth drained out of her face. He was frightened at the effect of his words. Her boundless capacity for suffering struck him as the strangest element in her tragic plight.

“Then you give us up altogether? You don’t care any longer what becomes of us?”

He paused a moment, and then turned back into the room, and took her two cold hands in his.

“Judith, look at me.” She obeyed.

“Can’t you understand that I care for only one thing at this moment? That you should realise what you’ve done—”

“About the money?” she breathed.

“Of course. About the money.”

“You really think that matters more than anything else?”

The unexpectedness of the question suddenly cut him adrift from his argument. It seemed to come out of some other plane of experience, to be thrust at him from depths of pain and disillusionment that he had not yet begun to sound.

“You see,” she pressed on, snatching at her opportunity, “if we could only get to Grandma Mervin’s, I believe she’d keep us. At any rate, she’d try to make mother see that we mustn’t be separated. I know she would, because in her letters to mother she always calls us ‘those poor children.’ She’s awfully old-fashioned, Grandma Mervin.... And the money, Martin—father won’t find out for ever so long that it’s gone. There was a lot more where I took it from. He always has such heaps with him; and he never knows how much he’s spent. Once he had a valet who stole a lot, and he didn’t discover it for months.... And without that money we can’t possibly get to America....”

Boyne pulled himself together with an effort, averting his eyes from the perilous mirage. “And you’re gambling on being as lucky as the other thief?” There—saying that had cleared his conscience, and he could go on more humanely: “Don’t you see, child, that this business of the money spoils the whole thing? You’ve got to give it back to me; and I’ve got to take it to your father. Then I’ll put up the best fight I can for you.”

Of this appeal she seemed to hear only the last words. “You will—oh, Martin, darling, you really will?”

In an instant her arms were about his neck, her wet face pressed against his lips. (“Now ... now ... now ...” he grumbled.) “I knew it, Martin! I knew in my soul you’d never chuck us,” she exulted in the sudden ecstasy of her relief. Waves of buoyancy seemed to be springing beneath her feet. “Martin, I know you’ll know just what to say to them,” she chanted.

“Go upstairs, Judith, and get that money,” he admonished her severely.

She turned and left the room. While she was gone he stood gazing out of the window. Of all the world of light and freedom before him, its spreading mountain slopes, its spires of granite reared into a cloud-pillared sky, and the giant blue shadows racing each other across the valleys, he saw nothing but the narrow thread of railway winding down to Venice and the Wheaters. He had still to make Judith write the letter to her father. He had still to deliver her—this child who trusted him—bound and helpless into the hands of the enemy.