“But we don’t intend to come back,” said Geraldine, tranquilly. She had seated herself on the lower berth, and taken off her hat and raincoat. “Don’t you understand we’re doing it on purpose? We’ve brought some supper with us in a parcel, and we’re going to have a wonderful time. We told you we were going on the boat some time.”
“But think how frightened everybody will be,” urged Gretel, trying a new tack. “You don’t want to frighten your mother and Miss Heath, and—and every one, do you? They won’t have any idea where you are.”
“Oh, yes, they will,” Geraldine reassured her; “we left a letter telling them all about it. Jerry wrote it, but I made it up. It was such a lovely letter; just like one in a book we read, that a boy wrote his mother when he was running away to sea. Mother says we’ve got to learn things by experience, and how can we learn about boats unless we go on one? They made us come all the way from New York in a horrid train, and we’ve got to go home that way, too, because Mother doesn’t like boats. So if we don’t go by ourselves we shall never know what boats are like. We’re going to be stowaways, and stay in here for quite a long time, and then we shall let ourselves be discovered, and everybody will be so interested, the way they are in stories. They’ll give us lots of good things to eat, and make up a purse for us, but we’re so clean they won’t need to give us a bath.”
Gretel clasped her hands in despair.
“But think how seasick you’ll be,” she hazarded as a last resource, “and how you’ll be punished when you get home.”
“Pooh!” sniffed Geraldine, contemptuously; “we’re Mind Cures; Mind Cures never get seasick. It’s only sillies like you that bother about such things.”
“We shan’t be punished either,” chimed in Jerry; “we’re never punished now, not since Mother began bringing us up by the Law of Love. She’ll only talk to us, and we don’t mind that much. Besides, she said we had to learn things by experience. There’s somebody coming; I’ve got to shut the door.”
And before the horrified Gretel could interpose, or even utter another word of protest, Jerry had closed the door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket. And at that very moment the second whistle sounded, and the steamer began to move.
CHAPTER X
LEARNING BY EXPERIENCE
GRETEL sank down upon the bed beside Geraldine, and began to cry.