After this there is a general raid upon the basket, Betty and Fitzgerald being quite conspicuous in their efforts to secure the largest cherries, whilst Jacky runs them very hard. And Susan, afraid lest the supply should fail before Bonnie gets a handsome share, pulls him to her and fills his little hands. But her own hands? Never! Stern is her youthful virtue. Those stolen cherries! No, no, she could not touch them, and, besides, to watch Bonnie’s delight in them is enough for her. Bonnie! It seems such a sad critique upon the little fragile child racked with rheumatism and so sadly disabled by it. In happier days, when he was, in truth, the bonniest little being of them all, his poor mother—now mercifully in heaven—had given him the dear pet name. And of course it had clung to him through all the ills that followed. The beginning was so simple, so easy to be described. A wet day when the child had escaped from home and had been forgotten until the early dinner reminded them of him. There were so many to remember, and they all ran so loosely here and there, that up to that hour no one had missed him. His mother was dead. The keynote of course lay there. She was dead and lying in her grave for a year or more, and the young things who tried to take her place, when they had asked a question or two, never thought of Bonnie again. Carew, the eldest boy, then only twelve, did not appear at dinner either, and it was naturally and carelessly supposed that Bonnie was with him. Alas for little Bonnie! Late that night he was discovered and brought home, saturated to the skin, and almost lifeless. Asleep he had been found beneath the shade of a big beech-tree; and sleep eternal he would have known indeed had he not been discovered before morning by the frightened people from the Vicarage, who, when night set in, had gone hunting for him far and near. The Rector himself, roused from his notes and papers by Susan’s terrors, had joined in the search; but it was Susan who found him, tired, exhausted (after a ramble in which he had lost himself, poor little soul!), and wet through from the rain that had fallen incessantly since three o’clock in the afternoon. It was Susan who carried him home, staggering sometimes beneath the weight, but strong in the very misery of her fear. When at last home was reached, it was Susan who undressed him, and lay awake the long night through with him, holding him in her warm arms to heat his shivering little body. And, indeed, when the morning came he seemed nothing the worse for his exposure. But towards the evening he began to shiver again, and next day he was lying prone, racked with all the pangs of rheumatic fever. They twisted and tore his little frame, and though at the last the doctor pulled him through, and he rose again from his bed, it was but as a shadow of his former merry self—a stricken child, a cripple for life.