Jack gazed at her silently for a minute. Then he asked:
“Has mother got any money?”
“Yes, but not much. Father gave a lot to those Colesons.”
“H’m. I think we boys ought to be able to earn enough to live on somehow. I can do with very little myself. What’s the matter with baby?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem at all right, poor darling.”
They both looked round, for Mrs. Kayll had come to the table, and was cutting bread, and talking to the little girls meanwhile.
“We must try and not make ourselves unhappy,” she said. “There are so many worse troubles than this. All we have to do is to be patient, and to be as careful as possible over every halfpenny. You three must stay away from school for the present, and Jem must contrive to get something to do, and with one thing and another I daresay we shall get on pretty well.”
“But how was it?” cried Jack. “How could they mistake father for a burglar if he told them his name, and his business, and where he came from, and everything? It’s so absurd.”
“Not altogether so absurd as you think,” his mother answered. “There he was passing the shop that was robbed at a time of night when very few people are out; and though he said he hadn’t a penny about him, when he was searched there were two pounds in his purse. It is very odd, certainly, for though your father took five sovereigns with him, he lent them all to Mrs. Coleson, and he couldn’t account for how he came by those other two in the least. No more can I. If it hadn’t been for them, I believe he would have been here now.”
Jack listened to this with a rapidly paling face. What he had meant for a pleasant surprise had turned out a most unpleasant one after all; his little joke had very likely done all the mischief. He had been denying himself, scraping and saving for months, working extra hours when by that he could earn a few more pence, and all for this! All to send his own father to prison for a week, and to cause a great deal more than what he had saved to be spent on proving him not guilty of theft. As these thoughts came clearly before him, he stole unnoticed from the room, and went upstairs to sit down in a chair by his own bed and cry as he had hardly cried since he was a baby.