She stuffed the paper into Rupert’s jacket pocket as the tall Murdstone-like figure advanced towards them. The three children left Rupert and walked up the platform.
‘I’m glad we gave him the chock,’ said Charles, and the word was hardly out of his mouth before a cold, hard hand touched his shoulder (and his cheek as he turned quickly) and a cold, hard voice said:
‘Little boy, I do not allow those under my charge to accept sweetmeats from strange children, especially dirty ones.’
And with that the Murdstone gentleman pushed the chocolate into Charles’s hand and went back to his prey.
‘Beast! Brute! Beast!’ said Charles.
After this it was mere forlorn-hopishness and die-on-the-barricade courage, as Charlotte said later, that made the children get into the same carriage with Rupert and his captor. They might as well have saved themselves the trouble. The Murdstone gentleman put Rupert in a corner and sat in front of him with a newspaper very widely opened. And at the next station he changed carriages, taking Rupert by the hand as though he had been, as Charles put it, ‘any old baby-girl.’
But as Rupert went out Caroline whispered to him:
‘You get some borage and eat it,’ and Rupert looked ‘Why?’
‘Borage gives courage, you know,’ she said, too late, for he was whisked away before he could hear her, and they saw him no more.