“It looks to me as if you’d been a bad boy!”
“Can’t be with him all the time!” Emmy put in, having reached a point of general self-defence in the course of her mental explorations. She was recovering from her shock and her first horrible fears.
“Shall we get him to bed? Carry him back in there?” Jenny asked. “The floor’s soaking wet.” She had not to receive any rebuke: Emmy, although shaken, was reviving in happiness and in graciousness with each second’s diminution of her dread. She now agreed to Pa’s removal; and they all stumbled into his bedroom and laid him upon his own bed. Alf went quickly back again to the kitchen for the brandy; and presently a good dose of this was sending its thrilling and reviving fire through Pa’s person. Emmy had busied herself in making a bandage for his wounded head; and Jenny had arranged him more comfortably, drying his chest and laying a little towel between his body and the night-short lest he should take cold. Pa was very complacently aware of these ministrations, and by the time they were in full order completed he was fast asleep, having expressed no sort of contrition for his naughtiness or for the alarm he had given them all.
Reassured, the party returned to the kitchen.
iii
Alf could not now wait to sit down to supper; but he drank a glass of beer, after getting it down for himself and rather humorously illustrating how Pa’s designs must have been frustrated. He then, with a quick handshake with Jenny, hurried away.
“I’ll let you out,” Emmy said. There were quick exchanged glances. Jenny was left alone in the kitchen for two or three minutes until Emmy returned, humming a little self-consciously, and no longer pale.
“Quite a commotion,” said Emmy, with assumed ease.
Jenny was looking at her, and Jenny’s heart felt as though it were bursting. She had never in her life known such a sensation of guilt—guilt at the suppression of a vital fact. Yet above that sense of guilt, which throbbed within all her consciousness, was a more superficial concern with the happenings of the moment.
“Yes,” Jenny said. “And.... Had you been in long?” she asked quickly.