Brodrick knew that he ought to tell the young rascals that their being fond of her didn't make it any more their business. But he couldn't. "What did you say to your Uncle Henry?" He really wanted to know. "Oh, we said it was all humbug about Jinny being neurotic. He's neurotic himself and so he thinks everybody else is. He's got it regularly on the brain." (If, Brodrick thought, Henry could have heard him!) "You can't think," said Winny, "how he bores us with it." "I said he couldn't wonder if she _was_ neurotic, when you think what she's got to stand. The boresomeness----" He left the idea to its own immensity. "Of what?" said Brodrick. "Well, for one thing, you know, of living everlastingly with Gertrude." Brodrick said, "Gertrude doesn't bore anybody." "She doesn't bore _you_, Uncle Hugh, of course, because you're a man." (Winny said that.) "Then," said Eddy, "there's _us_. You know, we're an awful family for a woman like Jinny to have married into. There isn't one of us fit to black her boots. And I believe Uncle Henry thinks she wasn't made for anything except to bring more of us into the world." Brodrick's face displayed a fine flush. "_You_'re all right, Uncle Hugh." Brodrick lowered his eyelids in modest acceptance of this tribute. "I keep forgetting you're one of them, because you married her." "What else did you say to him?" Eddy became excited. "Oh--I got in one before we left--I landed him neatly. I asked him why on earth--if he thought she was neurotic--he let her shut herself up for a whole year with that screaming kid, when any fat nurse would have done the job as well? And why he let her break her neck, running round after Aunt Mabel? I had him there." "What did your Uncle say to that?" (Brodrick's voice was rather faint.) "He didn't say anything. He couldn't--oh--well, he _did_ say my impertinence was unendurable. And I said _his_ was, when you think what Jinny is." He meditated on it. He had become, suddenly, a grave and reverent youth. "We really came," Winny said, "to know whether Jinny _is_ going away?" "She is going away," said Brodrick, "for three months." He rose and held out the hand of parting. To his surprise Winny kissed him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "And _if_--she has to stay a year?" "She shall stay," Brodrick said. LX She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. Nobody would find her.