“There’s everything—.” The old servant got to her feet, keeping her two charges by the hand. She put her finger to her lips, and stooped again to the dwarfs. “Master Waldo, Master Donald, you’ll come away now with your old Catherine. No one’s going to harm us, my dears; you’ll just go upstairs and let Janey Sampson put you to bed, for it’s very late; and presently Catherine’ll come up and hear your prayers like every night.” She moved to the door; but one of the dwarfs hung back, his forehead puckering, his eyes still fixed on Mrs. Durant in indescribable horror. “Good Dobbin,” cried he abruptly, in a piercing pipe. “No, dear, no; the lady won’t touch good Dobbin,” said Catherine. “It’s the young gentlemen’s great pet,” she added, glancing at the Roman steed in the middle of the floor. She led the changelings away, and a moment later returned. Her face was ashen-white under its swarthiness, and she stood looking at us like a figure of doom. “And now, perhaps,” she said, “you’ll be good enough to go away too.” “Go away?” Mrs. Durant, instead, came closer to her. “How can I—when I’ve just had this from your master?” She held out the letter she had brought to my house. Catherine glanced coldly at the page and returned it to her. “He says he’s going on a journey. Well, he’s been, madam; been and come back,” she said. “Come back? Already? He’s in the house, then? Oh, do let me—” Mrs. Durant dropped back before the old woman’s frozen gaze. “He’s lying overhead, dead on his bed, madam—just as they carried him up from the beach. Do you suppose, else, you’d have ever got in here and seen the young gentlemen? He rushed out and died sooner than have them seen, the poor lambs; him that was their father, madam. And here you and this gentleman come thrusting yourselves in....” I thought Mrs. Durant would reel under the shock; but she stood quiet, very quiet—it was almost as if the blow had mysteriously strengthened her. “He’s dead? He’s killed himself?” She looked slowly about the trivial tragic room. “Oh, now I understand,” she said. Old Catherine faced her with grim lips. “It’s a pity you didn’t understand sooner, then; you and the others, whoever they was, forever poking and prying; till at last that miserable girl brought in the police on us—” “The police?” “They was here, madam, in this house, not an hour ago, frightening my young gentlemen out of their senses. When word came that my master had been found on the beach they went down there to bring him back. Now they’ve gone to Hingham to report his death to the coroner. But there’s one of them in the kitchen, mounting guard. Over what, I wonder? As if my young gentlemen could run away! Where in God’s pity would they go? Wherever it is, I’ll go with them; I’ll never leave them.... And here we were at peace for thirty years, till you brought that man to draw the pictures of the house....”