“Is that all she says?” asked Chrissie, for Leila was already buried in a book which she had propped against her breakfast-cup, only moving it from time to time as she drank her tea. “When are they coming back? She said she’d tell us as soon as she could.”
“They’d only been there a few hours when she wrote. I don’t know how you could expect her to say—you’re so babyish, Chrissie,” said Roland.
“Babyish,” she repeated scornfully, “I know what Mummy said better than you do. I’ll write and ask her to tell me, not you.”
Roland by this time had got out the letter and was reading it again.
“As it happens,” he said, good-naturedly enough, though his tone was decidedly “superior,” “she does say something about it, and something else that I don’t understand,” and the boy’s face clouded a little.
“She seems very bothered,” he replied doubtfully, still fingering the sheet of paper. “I think both she and Dad were pretty worried before they left.”
“Well,” said Chrissie, “I suppose they had to be. I suppose they had to care for Uncle Percy. P’raps he was nicer before he got so deaf. I don’t see that Mums need have gone, though.”
“She’s coming back as soon as she can,” Roland went on. “On Monday, most likely. Dad will have to stay there, and she has to come back to do a lot of business things for him here, and then she says she’ll explain that Dad and she are very worried, and she hopes we’ll all be very good while they’re away, and that we must help her to be very brave. What can she mean?”
All except Leila looked rather grave and puzzled; all, that is to say, except Nurse, whose face expressed distress, but not surprise.
“She knows something,” thought Chrissie. Then she turned impatiently to her elder sister.