"But Mother didn't see it." She gave an impatient sigh.
"She's a law unto herself," McTaggart suggested. "I vote we drown Stephen. Some dark night—in the Regent's Park Canal. And here it is; let's choose the spot."
He paused as he spoke on the little iron bridge that spans the narrow stream, where the barges come and go; slowly drifting along the still line of water, a mute protest against the feverish haste of the age.
"The worst of it is," said Jill, ignoring his suggestion to remove the enemy into a better world, "that Stephen eggs her on in all this militant work. And Mother isn't strong; she's not fit for it. Why, last year she was ill for weeks after that trouble when the windows were smashed in Regent Street. And her name was in the papers. Roddy got so ragged. All the boys at school were pulling his leg. And he's so proud of Mother!—it nearly broke his heart—to think of her being taken off to a common police station. Why! ..."
She stopped short, leaning over the bridge,—"There he is, on the foot path, with his fishing rod."
She put her hands to her mouth and called in her clear voice, "Rod-dy!"
"Hullo!" came an answering hail. "You up there, Jill?"
There came a scrambling in the bushes that fringed the waterway, and, with a noise of snapping twigs at the summit of the bank, a leg and an arm shot out, then a laughing boy's face, with a great black smudge neatly bisecting it.
"Hullo, Peter!" The pair shook hands.
"Had any sport?" said McTaggart gravely.