I could not help making room for him in my cot, and then we put our arms round each other, and Tom said to me in a very low voice—"Audrey, do you mean that Racey and you and me are all going to die?"
Poor Tom, he looked so pitiful when he said that I was so sorry for him.
"Oh no, Tom dear. Of course I don't mean that. What could have made you think so?" I said.
"Because unless it was that I don't see how we could go away alone. Papa and mother would never let us. We're too little."
"I didn't mean that we'd really go alone in the railway," I explained, "somebody would go with us—Pierson perhaps, if she wasn't married. But still in a way it would be going away alone. Oh Tom, I have felt so funny all night—as if I couldn't believe it."
Then I told him what I had heard and what mother had told me; and all the time we held each other tight. We felt so strange—the telling it to Tom made it seem more real to me, and poor Tom seemed to feel it was real at once. When I left off speaking at last, he stared at me again with his puzzled-looking eyes, but he didn't seem as if he was going to cry.
"Audrey," he said at last, starting up, "don't you think if we were all to pray to God for papa and mother not to go away that that would be the best plan?"
I didn't quite know what to say. I knew it was always a good thing to pray to God, but yet I didn't feel sure that it would stop papa and mother's going away. I was rather puzzled, but I didn't quite like to say so to Tom.
"Audrey," he said, jigging me a little, "speak, be quick. Wouldn't that be a good plan? Perhaps then a letter would come at breakfast to say they weren't to go—wouldn't they be pleased?"
"I don't know," I said at last. "I almost think, for some things, papa wants to go, and that it's a good thing for him, and if it's a good thing for him I dare say God wouldn't unsettle it."