Charity, extremely dirty—she had apparently run dusty hands across her forehead several times—had come to the door of the storage-room. At the sight of Rupert she flushed and made a hurried attempt at smoothing her hair.
"I—" she began, when Ricky interrupted her.
"Charity is helping us, which is more than we can say of you. Go back to your old den and hibernate. And then you can't look down that long nose of yours when we turn up the papers that'll save us from the poorhouse."
"That's telling him," Val murmured approvingly as he fanned himself with one of the cleaner cloths. "But perhaps we had better explain. You see, Satan went hunting and found work for idle hands," and he told the tale of the sliding panel behind the bed.
When he had finished, Rupert laughed. "So you are still determined on treasure hunting, are you? Well, if it will keep you out of mischief, go to it."
"Rupert," Ricky faced him squarely, "don't be utterly insufferable. If you had one drop of hot blood in you, you'd be just as thrilled as we are. Just because you've been around and around the world until you got dizzy or something, you needn't stand there with that 'See-the-little-children-play' smirk on your face. You don't really care whether we lose Pirate's Haven or not, do you?"
Rupert straightened and the color crept up across his high cheek-bones. His mouth opened and then he closed it again without speaking the words he had intended, closed with a firmness which tightened his lips into a straight line.
"Don't stand there and glower at me," Ricky went on. "Why don't you say what you were going to? I'm just about tired of this world-weary attitude—"
"Ricky!" Val clapped his black hand over her mouth and turned to Charity. "Please excuse the fireworks. They are not usual, I assure you."
"Let me go!" Ricky twisted out of his grip. "I don't care if Charity does hear. She ought to know what we're really like!"