‘Ah, that’s it!’ says Dom. ‘Really, Betty, I think you might hold on long enough to finish your own story. It appears Aunt Jemima went up to the farm yesterday, and found that they had taken the bath as an ornament, and had nailed it up against the sitting-room wall with four long tenpenny nails, and—’ Here, in spite of his lecture to Betty, Mr. Fitzgerald himself gives way, and, falling back upon the grass, shouts with laughter. ‘They took it,’ gasps Carew, ‘as some curio from some barbarous country—a sort of shield, you know; a savage weapon! They had never seen a bath before. Oh my!’ He, too, has gone into an ecstasy of mirth. ‘I expect they thought it was straight from South Africa.’ ‘Poor Aunt Jemima!’ says Betty, when she can speak. ‘It must have been a blow to her.’ ‘Talking of blows,’ says Carew, turning to her sharply, and somewhat indignantly, ‘I never knew anyone blow their nose like you, Betty; you’ve been at it now since early dawn.’ ‘Well, I can’t help it,’ says Betty, very rightly aggrieved, ‘if I have got a cold in my head.’ ‘I’ve a cold, too,’ says Jacky dismally—Jacky is always dismal—‘but it isn’t as bad as Betty’s. My head is aching, but Betty’s nose is only running.’ A frightful silence follows upon this terrific speech. Mr. Fitzgerald, who can always be depended upon at a crisis, breaks it. ‘Not far, I trust,’ says he, with exaggerated anxiety. ‘We could hardly spare it. Betty’s nose is the one presentable member of that sort in the family.’ Betty, between the pauses of this speech, can be heard threatening Jacky. ‘No, no; never! I won’t give it now. You’re a little wretch! Even if I promised to give it I don’t care. I’ll take it back. You shan’t have it now.’ But all this is so distinctly not meant to be heard that no one takes any notice of it, and any serious consequences are prevented by the fact that Dominick, rising, throws himself between the puzzled Jacky and the irate Betty. In the meantime, Crosby draws himself along the rug until he is even closer to Susan, who now again is looking serious. ‘What is troubling you, righteous soul?’ asks he lightly. ‘How do you know I am troubled? I am not, really.’ ‘Yet you are thinking, and very gravely, too.’ ‘Ah, that is another thing. I was thinking,’ says Susan gently, ‘of the girl in there’—nodding towards the Cottage. ‘It must be a very sad thing to have no one belonging to you.’ ‘Sad indeed! But you must not let your sympathy for her run too far afield. If not a father or mother, she must have—other ties.’ ‘Brothers, you mean, or sisters?’ ‘Yes, just so—brothers or sisters. They’ll turn up presently, no doubt.’ He looks at her as if waiting for an inspiration, and then it comes to him. ‘What a sympathetic mind you have!’ says he. ‘And yet you don’t give me a share of it. You have known me quite a long time now, and I have no father or mother, yet you have not wept with me.’