“He saved the lives of your babies,” replied Courtesy. “And anyway, a judgment needs a surgeon just as much as a simple fracture.” “Yerce, yerce, only don’t ask me to help,” said the priest. “I prefer to succour those deserving of help.” And he went out into the street again. He seemed wedded to the word succour. It is a pose word, and fitted him exactly. Nothing but an earthquake could have made this worm turn. But the effect of the disaster on the priest was an obstinate certainty that there was a Jonah in the case, and that, as heaven was never to blame, the wicked were entirely responsible. “Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy. “I’ll have to go for a surgeon myself.” “I’ll go with you,” cried the mother of Aitch and Zed, whose name, for the sake of brevity, was Mrs. Tring. “I don’t know what has become of my Dally” (who was her husband). “Somebody must sit with the gardener,” said Courtesy, when she came back from a successful search for an intact bed, into which, with the help of a housemaid, she had inserted the gardener. “I will sit with him,” said the harsh voice of Mrs. Rust, as she rose from a seat where she had been sitting with an enormous paper bag held in a rigid hand. “I refuse to run about the streets with brandy. All the old cats are doing that.” “Why, Mrs. Rust,” observed Courtesy, whose conventionality was not quite so striking after an earthquake as it had been upon the comparatively stable Atlantic. “I had clean forgotten that you existed.” “Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “I was buying mangoes when the incident occurred. Perhaps the gardener would like a mango.” “Perhaps he would. I am so glad to see that you don’t take the same view about the gardener as the——” “I never take the same view,” barked Mrs. Rust. “Show me the boy’s room.” So the gardener saw that poisonous hair advance along a shaft of sunlight that intruded through the broken shutter. “Your jug and basin are broken,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.” “Oh, there are several things broken in this town,” he said feverishly. “Windows and necks and a heart or two.” Mrs. Rust sat deliberately on a chair and burst into tears. “I was buying mangoes,” she sobbed stormily, “from a black man with bleached hair. And the whole of a shop-front fell out on him. One brick hit my toe. I looked at the man through a sort of cage of fallen things. It was as if—one had trodden on red currants.” “What did you do?” panted the gardener. “How fine to live in a world where things happen.” “I ran away,” said Mrs. Rust shakily. “I didn’t pay for the mangoes.” “I would rather have had this happen,” said the gardener after a pause, “and have broken my leg, than have had an ordinary day to meet me on Trinity Island.” After another pause, he added: “But I have lost the suffragette. And that is another matter.” “Was she killed?” asked Mrs. Rust, steeling herself against the commonplace duty of condolence. “Certainly not,” replied the gardener. “She is a militant suffragette.”