Afterwards

"I don't see anything to laugh at," she observed icily. "Seems to me people being dead ought to make you cry 'stead of laugh."

"Quite so, Cherry," returned Anstice, wiping his eyes ostentatiously. "But you see in this case there wasn't anybody dead--at least, so I understood from Mrs. Carstairs."

"Yes, there was, then," returned Cherry, still unforgiving. "I'd gone and killed my best-b'loved Lady Daimler"--christened from her mother's car--"on purpose to make a pretty death-bed for Tochatti--and then she simply flew into a temper--oh, a most dreadful temper, my dear!" At the thought of Tochatti's anger she forgave Anstice's lesser offence, and took him once more into her favour.

"That was too bad, especially as I'm sure Tochatti doesn't, often lose her temper with you," said Anstice with some guile; and Cherry looked at him gravely, without speaking.

"Not with me," she announced presently. "But Tochatti gets awful cross sometimes. She used to be fearful angry with Nurse Marg'ret. Where's Nurse Marg'ret now, my dear?"

"Don't know, Cherry. I suppose she is nursing someone else by this time. Why do you want to know?"

"'Cos I like Nurse Marg'ret," said Cherry seriously. "Tochatti didn't. She made a wax dollie of her once, and she only does that when she doesn't like peoples."

"A wax dollie?" Anstice was honestly puzzled. "My dear child, what do you mean?"

"She did," said Cherry stoutly. "She maded an image like what they have in their churches, because I saw her do it--out of a candle, and then she got a great long pin and stuck it in the gas and runned it into the little dollie." As Cherry grew excited her speech became slightly unintelligible. "And I know it was Nurse Marg'ret 'cos she wrote a great big 'M' on a bit of paper and pinned it on to show who it was meant for."

Her words made an instant and very unexpected impression on her hearer; not alone as a revelation of Tochatti's mediæval fashion of revenging herself upon an unconscious rival--though this method of revenge was amazing in the twentieth century--but as a strangely apt confirmation of those doubts and suspicions which had been gathering round the Italian woman in Anstice's mind during the last few days.

If Cherry had spoken truly--and there was no reason to think the child was lying--then Tochatti's supposed inability to write was an error; and once that fact were proved it should not, surely, be difficult to unravel the mystery which had already caused so much unhappiness.