“Oh, Busson, Busson, let him be till the morning,” the girls heard Mrs. Busson entreating her husband, her voice shrill with alarm.
Evidently she was trying, by main force, to hold the infuriated man back. “It will be plenty soon enough to punish him to-morrow.”
Involuntarily, Phoena thought of the scenes they had so often enacted in their ogre games, where the pitiful ogress sought to gain time for the luckless victims.
But how far Mrs. Busson would have succeeded or not was doubtful, if, at that critical moment, the doctor had not appeared on the scene. His presence produced at once a comparative calm.
“I wonder if poor Di will soon be better,” said Phoena, as they heard Dr. Forbes going upstairs to Di’s room, whence her screams still came at very short intervals.
Libbie had put her to bed in another part of the house.
“Do you suppose that she really will be blind?” asked Faith. “Oh, how could she and Andrew have done such a thing!”
“I thought they were up to something,” said Phoena; “but I never thought, after all we had said about it, that they would have done that.”
“And I’m so sorry for poor Mrs. Busson,” said Fay, “it seems so hard that she should get such a scolding for our ill-doing.”
“Yes, and after she’d been giving us such a happy afternoon. What’s that?” added Phoena.