But here Brenda's voice broke utterly, and she, too, hurriedly left the room.
"Well," exclaimed Nesta, "I think it just horrid of them. I shall never, never like them now."
Eustace turned a pair of surprised brown eyes upon her.
"Won't you?" he said wonderingly. "Why, I like them better than I did, ever so much."
"What!" Nesta said, "you like them better for saying a horrid thing like that? To make out it was Peter's fault! Poor little Peter, who was so nearly drowned himself!"
"It wasn't that part I was thinking of," said Eustace, "but just how they loved her. Somehow I never thought of it before. Same way we love mother, I guess; and I don't know what I should have thought if mother had been drowned saving some one else's brother."
Nesta stared at him blankly. There were things about Eustace lately that she did not understand. She knew nothing of Bob's maxim about looking at two sides of a question, so she could see no reason for the strange things he sometimes said, and he was far too reticent to have explained.
"Well, all I can say is, I wish we had never come," said Nesta for about the twentieth time. "Nothing is nice, and it will be more hateful than ever now they feel like that about Peter. We had better tell mother and father, and ask them to take us away."
"What's that I hear?" said an astonished voice at the door.
The children all jumped and turned round, for there stood their grandfather. They were speechless with dismay; they could not have pictured a worse thing happening.