Afterwards

"Oh?" Anstice looked rather blank. "But I don't see----"

"Well, it seems the idea fired Cherry's imagination; and this morning, when Tochatti returned from High Mass about noon, she found the blinds pulled down in all the front windows of the house!"

"The little monkey!" Sir Richard laughed. "I'll wager the woman got a fright!"

"She certainly did, and matters were not improved by Cherry coming to meet her with her face quite wet with tears--you know Cherry is a born actress--and begging her, between sobs, to come upstairs softly as someone was dead!"

"Someone? She did not specify who it was?"

"No--or if she did Tochatti did not understand; but when she got into the nursery she found an elaborately conceived representation of a Catholic death-bed--flowers, bits of candle, and so on; and Cherry's very biggest doll--the one you gave her, by the way, Dr. Anstice--enacting the part of the corpse!"

Even Anstice's mood was not proof against the humour of the small child's pantomime; and both he and Sir Richard laughed heartily.

"And Tochatti took it amiss?" Sir Richard put the question amid his laughter.

"Yes. It seems she had really had a bad fright; and on finding Cherry in tears she never doubted that some tragedy had occurred!"

"So you had to punish the poor mite for her realism!"

"Yes. Tochatti waited for me to return--I was out motoring--and then hauled the culprit before me; and although I really didn't see much harm in poor little Cherry's joke I was obliged, in order to pacify Tochatti, to sentence her to go to bed early--a special punishment on Sunday, when, as a rule, she sits up quite late!"

"I almost wonder," said Anstice slowly, "that Tochatti, devoted as she is to Cherry, could bring herself to give the child away. One would have expected her to hush up any small misdeeds, not dwell upon them to the powers that be."

Chloe looked at him with a hint of cynicism in her eyes.

"Even Tochatti is human," she said, "and when one has had a fright one's natural impulse, on being reassured, is to scold somebody. Besides, Tochatti, in her way, is implacable. She never forgives what she really considers an injury."

These words, fitting in so curiously with their conversation a little earlier, caused the men to glance surreptitiously at one another; but Chloe, whose eyes were as sharp as her wits, intercepted the look.