‘No!’ says Susan. The word is not a denial; it is merely an ejaculative expression of the most extreme astonishment, largely mingled with disbelief. The sun is glinting through the trees in the old orchard right down on her head, striking a light from the glancing knitting-needles she has now let fall into her lap. This old orchard is the happy hunting-ground of the Barry children old and young—the place which they rush to in their joyous moments, the place which they crawl to with their griefs and woes. To-day neither joys nor griefs are near them, and it is out of sheer love alone for its mossy old apple-trees and its sunlit corners that Susan had tripped in here a while ago with a dilapidated old novel tucked into her apron pocket, and the eternal sock with the heel half turned between her pretty fingers. After her had straggled Betty, a slender creature of sixteen, and Tom, the baby. Tom was five, but he was always the baby, there having been no more babies after him, principally because his mother died when he was born. And last of all came Bonnie, the little cripple, hopping sadly on his crutches, until Susan saw him, and ran back to him and caught him in her arms, and placed him beside her on the warm soft grass, putting out her much-washed cotton skirt that he might sit upon it, and so be protected from even an imaginary damp, and had cuddled him up to her, to the many droppings of the stitches of the long-suffering heel. Carew, who came between Betty and Susan, was away, fishing somewhere in the Crosby river, and Jacky had not put in an appearance since breakfast. How on earth his lessons are going to be prepared between this—two o’clock—and five, makes Susan wonder anxiously. Why doesn’t he come home? What can he be doing? She has hardly got further than this in her thoughts of the truant, when suddenly he appears upon the scene, a very rosy, bright-eyed rascal, big with news. Indeed, it was the coming of Jacky, and the astounding revelation in his opening sentence—that he had sprung upon them in a most unprincipled way, without a word of warning—that had drawn from Susan that heavily emphasized ‘No!’ She speaks again now. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she says. ‘Oh, Susan, why not?’ asks Betty, who is sitting with her hands folded behind her head, perhaps because if she brought them forward she might find some knitting to do, too. Idle hands they are, only made for mischief; so is the face to which they belong. ‘Because it’s nonsense,’ says Susan, shrugging her shoulders, and drawing Bonnie closer to her. ‘And, besides, I don’t want to believe it.’ ‘Oh, I do!’ says Betty, with a little grin from under her big sun-hat. ‘Go on, Jacky.’ ‘I saw her, I saw her plain,’ says Jacky, his rosy round face fired with joy at the thought of being for once the bearer of important news. ‘She was walking about in the garden.’ ‘In,’ from Susan, in a severe tone, ‘Mr. Wyndham’s garden?’