“Do—or they will certainly blurt it out themselves. I will go to bed now, and I think you should do the same as soon as possible.” She refused any further help, saying that she was quite able to manage alone. I watched her mount the stairs slowly, and then went off with my message for the culprits, whom I found sitting together on Jack’s bed, steeped in woe. They received my news with relief, though it did not dispel their gloom.
“Jolly decent of Mother,” Judy said: “Beryl and Harry would have been beasts—’specially Beryl. Not that we don’t deserve it; but I can’t stick Beryl’s way of telling us we’re worms. Even if you feel wormy you don’t want it rubbed in. And every one else would have despised us.” She looked at me keenly. “Did you ask Mother not to tell, Miss Earle?”
“Indeed, I didn’t,” I hastened to assure her. “But I was ever so glad that she said she wouldn’t.”
Judy’s lip quivered, and suddenly she broke into hard, choked sobbing. It isn’t a pleasant thing to see the complete surrender of a person who ordinarily shows no feeling whatever: I put my arm round her, not far removed from tears myself, and was not surprised when Jack buried his face in the pillow and howled too.
“Oh, you poor kids!” I uttered, entirely forgetting that I was a governess. They seemed to forget it too, for they clung to me desperately, and I hugged them and lent them my handkerchief in turn, since neither possessed one. When they began to pull themselves together, and to look shame-faced, I slipped away to the kitchen and came back with some cake and hot milk, over which they became comparatively cheerful.
“If you ask me,” said Jack, “it was a pretty hard-luck night. If you and Mother hadn’t smelt us out we’d have had our fireworks without any accident. Why, Ju and I have used fireworks since we were kids!”
“Rather!” agreed Judy. “And when they did go off in a general mix-up, there was no need for me to catch fire. Why did it want to happen, I’d like to know?”
“And when it happened it was bad luck that your Mother got burned,” I supported. “Some bad-tempered gnome was certainly taking the place of your fairy godmother to-night, chickens. Only none of it would have happened at all if you hadn’t gone out when you were supposed to be in bed. You didn’t have much luck the last time, either, did you, Jack?”
They regarded me, wide-eyed.
“How—did—you—know?” uttered Jack.