“Don’t go! Oh, please don’t!” she pleaded, gently. “Please wait. I want so much to speak to you.”
Peanut had no particular reason for being afraid of women. The only one he had studied at close range had been kind to him to the point of indulgence. There was something in the voice of this one that held him fast. The woman came a step closer. She seemed young and beautiful to Peanut.
“Please tell me your name,” she said.
“Peanut.”
“Oh, that is what they call you, perhaps. Your real name, I mean.”
The boy made no reply at first to this comment. He seemed gathering something from the mists of memory.
“Sam told me that it used to be—longer than that,” he ventured at last, very slowly. “He told me once that it was Philip—Nutt, but he said P. was the same as Philip, and that he thought Peanut fit me better.”
Panic seemed about to return, as the result of this long speech, and once more it required the soothing diplomacy of Miss Schofield to detain him.
“How very nice,” she said. “And now won’t you please tell me where you live, and about Sam and the grave?”
Again Peanut hesitated. Then he pointed behind him.