Ruth glanced at her timidly. ‘I think, perhaps, it is worse for Scales than any one,’ she ventured to say. ‘Of course, he’s a hopeless idiot, but he didn’t mean––’
‘Oh, never mind about Scales!’ interrupted Margaret; and Ruth took up the compasses and began drawing invisible circles on the tablecloth.
A bit of conversation drifted across to them from the juniors’ room.
‘Her brothers stopped all night; so did the old lady,’ Mary Wells was saying. ‘I saw their breakfast going into Finny’s study this morning, when Tommy called me back into the dining-room to fold my table-napkin.’
‘How could you notice a thing like that?’ came in plaintive, reproving tones from Angela. ‘I wish I was able to bear up like you, Mary.’
‘Poor darling!’ said Mary Wells, tenderly.
‘Was Jill there too?’ asked another voice.
‘She’s up in Finny’s bedroom, with her,’ answered Angela, quickly. She was almost restored to a normal condition by the desire to tell something that nobody else knew. Then she remembered herself, and subsided into a proper state of tearfulness. ‘I was hanging about upstairs, to see if I could find out how she was, when Jill passed me in a white apron, looking just like a real nurse,’ she went on, with a long-drawn sigh. ‘I tried to speak to her, but I was too upset.’
‘Poor darling!’ cried Mary Wells, more fervently than before.
Margaret stirred impatiently, and flung down her pencil. ‘I say,’ she said to Ruth, ‘what can we give those children to do? I’m sure Finny wouldn’t like them to go on drivelling like that. Angela is such a little idiot!’