It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children. She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the centre of their passionate devotion. Actually, she was congenitally incapable of telling one end of a child from the other. She was a dumpy little woman--Cornish, I believe. When she was herself a baby she was so small they carried her about on a cushion for fear a clumsy human arm might damage her. She could read when she was two and a half. Her reading was always serious. Nor had she been backward in the humaner studies: her mistresses spoke of her Deportment as something rarely seen outside the older Royal Houses: in spite of a figure like a bolster, she could step into a coach like an angel getting onto a cloud. She was very quick-tempered. Mr. Bas-Thornton also had every accomplishment, except two: that of primogeniture, and that of making a living. Either would have provided for them. If it would have surprised the mother, it would undoubtedly have surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis: whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children had loved Tabby first and foremost in all the world, some of each other second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the ceremony of riding home on his stirrups. Jamaica remained, and blossomed anew, its womb being inexhaustible. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton remained, and with patience and tears tried to reconstruct things, in so far as they could be reconstructed. But the danger which their beloved little ones had been through was not a thing to risk again. Heaven had warned them. The children must go. Nor was the only danger physical. ‘That awful night!’ said Mrs. Thornton, once, when discussing their plan of sending them home to school: ‘Oh my dear, what the poor little things must have suffered! Think how much more acute Fear is to a child! And they were so brave, so English.’ ‘I don’t believe they realised it.’ (He only said that to be contradictious: he could hardly expect it to be taken seriously.) ‘You know, I am terribly afraid what permanent, _inward_ effect a shock like that may have on them. Have you noticed they never so much as mention it? In England they would at least be safe from dangers of that sort.’ Meanwhile the children, accepting the new life as a matter of course, were thoroughly enjoying it. Most children, on a railway journey, prefer to change at as many stations as possible.