But their voices hushed, and a wistful look crept into their faces, as they passed the door leading into Aunt Judith's empty bedroom. The old lady had loved them so dearly, and they had given her love for love in unstinted measure, so that now she was dead there was an awful blank in their hearts and their lives.
Being very tired and very healthy, however, they went to sleep directly they tumbled into bed; indeed Ducky could not keep awake long enough to eat her cake, so Nealie laid it on the chair by the little girl's bed for her to find when she opened her eyes in the morning.
Sleep was longer in coming to Nealie than to the others. She was older than they were, and had been mother to them so long that she was apt to be thinking out ways and means when she ought to have been asleep.
It would be too utterly delightful to go out to Australia and live with her father. It was nearly seven years since she had seen him, and her heart was always aching at the thought of his lonely exile.
If only Mr. Runciman would consent to their going! But would he?
"Well, it is of no use to worry and to wonder; we must just wait and see. But I think when all seven of us go marching into that splendid library of his at The Paddock, he will be so dismayed to see what a lot of us there are, that he will be quite ready to take the very shortest way of getting rid of the bother of looking after us," she said to herself, with a soft little laugh which rippled through the dark room and even made itself heard in the other room across the passage where the four boys were sleeping; and Rupert, who had been having bad dreams because his lame foot was hurting rather badly, smiled in his uneasy slumber and straightway drifted off into a more profound repose, from which he did not wake until the misty September dawning crept over the wide plantations of beech and larch for which Beechleigh was famous.