“Aunt Adela will be angry.” But her tone was merely speculative. Laura was stone to Aunt Adela’s worst punishments now.
Justin considered. The steadiness of the rain, long overdue, was prophetic. No chance of its lifting this week-end. No escape, for all his wasted hour, for Justin’s bicycle. Justin’s bicycle must submit to a soaking, with Justin and Laura on its back. It had, going by the road that avoided Laura’s hill-tops, a seven-mile run before it, to reach even Justin’s end of Brackenhurst. Justin, as he slipped off the damp haystack and resumed his sopping coat, thought that he and his bicycle would have done their duty and something over if they escorted Laura thus far. She could be sent on to Green Gates in the pony-trap, if his mother did not insist, as he shrewdly suspected she would when she heard the whole story, on keeping the child over-night, to be coddled against colds and heartache.
He was not wrong. Mrs. Cloud, once satisfied that no bones had been broken and that he would take a hot bath and drink a hot posset as soon as they could be prepared, was ready enough to follow him to the hall where Laura, numbed with cold and wet and the long ride on Justin’s cross-bar, sat in a heap where he had left her, like a small trapped animal: and after a glance, Mrs. Cloud, all soft hair and soft eyes and soft voice, had forgotten even Justin. A groom had been despatched to Green Gates indeed; but Laura, warmed and bathed and fed, was settled for the night in a fire-lit room, in the bed that Justin had outgrown, and that his mother had not brought herself to give away.
Mrs. Cloud, as the dinner-bell rang, had a motherly good-night, with tuckings-up and the tenderest of kisses for Laura. But Laura lay passive, unresponsive, on the pillow that was scarcely whiter than her face, staring up at Mrs. Cloud with wide, dark eyes.
“What is it, Laura?” Mrs. Cloud smiled down at her.
She murmured something beneath her breath, as a scared child will.
“What is it? Do you want anything?” Mrs. Cloud bent down, her face close to the unwinking eyes.
“I want——” In a whisper Laura made known her need. “I want the big boy.”
Mrs. Cloud shook her head.
“Not now. You must go to sleep now. You shall see Justin tomorrow.”