Stay! She would go up to her own room and pray very, very hard that Micky might be found. Perhaps that would succeed. At all events, it would be better than this dreadful waiting and doing nothing. Emmeline wondered that she had not thought of it before.
She ran upstairs, but was rather taken aback to find her bedroom occupied by Alice, who was dusting the mantelpiece ornaments. To be sure, she hurried out of the room as soon as the young lady appeared, but not before Emmeline had seen that her eyes were red and swollen. Emmeline knelt down by her bedside, but, try as she would, she could not fix her thoughts. They kept wandering off to Alice.
That horrible money! The thought of it kept haunting Emmeline like some tormenting demon. She had almost forgotten it for a time in the trouble of the morning, but now it kept coming between her and her prayers. How could she expect them to be answered so long as she was deceiving everyone and letting Alice suffer under a false accusation?
‘Nonsense,’ she told herself. ‘There’s no deceiving in not telling that meddlesome Jane what I did with my own extra money-box money! I did tell her I was sure Alice hadn’t taken it, and I don’t think really she meant to make any fuss about it till Aunt Grace comes home. It must be about Micky Alice is crying. Anyhow, Aunt Grace is the person who really matters, not Jane, and, if she suspects Alice, I’ll tell her that I took the money. It would be very unkind to bother them about it just now when they’re in such trouble. It would worry them dreadfully, for they’d be certain to ask questions, and it would all come out about Diamond Jubilee and his having disappeared, too, and they’d be sure to think Micky had run away with him, and then they’d write and frighten poor Aunt Grace. No, for Aunt Grace’s sake, I really can’t risk their finding out about Diamond Jubilee till Micky’s safe back.’
She was still trying to persuade herself that she was justified in keeping silence about him, when the door was burst open, and in rushed Kitty, very untidy, and with short white hairs sticking all over her dress. In her hand was an extremely dirty, crumpled bit of paper, which looked as if it might have been torn out of an exercise-book.
She closed the door with a care very unlike her usual slap-dash ways, and came close up to Emmeline before she whispered mysteriously:
‘Look what I’ve found in Punch’s kennel! Mr. Brown had chained him up again, and I felt so miserable that I just had to be with the darling. He is such a comfort in trouble.’
Emmeline was not listening. She was staring at some pencilled words scribbled on the torn piece of paper.
‘Dear Kitty’ (she read), ‘I am leving this were you’ll be the person most likely to find it. This is to tell you I am going back to grene ginger land with dimund joublee. Hes jolly well had enuf of this he ses, and so have I, speshally after yestidday, wich show how beestly everything will be with Jane to put peeple to bed just for akserdents like the blankets. Besids of corse as Im his adopted father I have to go to, or how could I trane him. It will be a jolly lark. Dont tell enyone were Ive gone except you may Emmeline, as shes in it too, and don’t greave for me too much dear sister. Your loving bother, Micky.’