THE doctor’s prophecy proved true, for after a game of hockey on the Heath with Ralph and Ronald and one or two other lads whom they met, and whom Ralph knew, Vivian felt like a different boy. Indeed, all three boys felt better for the game, and more disposed to look on the bright side of things, and they were returning home for dinner in fairly good spirits when Ralph stopped short with a sudden exclamation.

‘Hallo! What on earth is up now?’ he said. ‘There’s a policeman walking off with our Joe. Surely they don’t think that it was he who stole the silver?’

They all stopped and gazed with wondering eyes in the direction in which Ralph was pointing. Sure enough, just leaving the lodge gates was one of the stalwart policemen who had been about the house all morning, and the lad whose arm he was holding with a not very friendly grasp was certainly Joe Flinders the lad who had worked under Hunter the gardener for more than a year, and who was a great favourite with the children. He was the only son of a widowed mother, and a nice, civil, obliging boy, with a cheery word for every one, and endless patience with little Claude, who would follow him for hours at a time with a wheelbarrow and spade which his father had bought for him.

As a rule, Joe was always whistling, and walked about with a certain self-satisfied swagger, with his cap on the back of his head; for was he not earning good wages, and did he not bid fair to become as good a gardener as Mr Hunter?

But to-day things were very different. He dragged his feet along with a hopeless slouch, and his cap was pulled right over his eyes, as if to hide his face from the passers-by.

With one accord the boys raced after them, and overtook the strangely mated couple just as they turned the corner at the grocer’s shop and turned up the path which led over the Heath to the police station.

‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ asked Ralph, who had been fairly startled out of his indifference by the events of the day, looking pityingly at Joe’s swollen and tear-stained eyes, for the big lad was crying like a baby.

‘They say that I had sommat to do with the robbery, Master Ralph,’ he sobbed, ‘because when master sent Mr Hunter to cut down the branches where Miss Isobel fell, in case some one else climbed up the tree and hurt themselves, he found a hole in one of the branches, and a pistol in it, which it seems had been lost, and it was wrapped up in one of my old caps, the one I spoilt with the white paint when I was a-painting the fence round the far paddock. I threw away the cap, and never thought about it again; but ’tis mine sure enough, though ’ow it came to be in the ’ole I don’t know no more than an infant. And now my situation and my character is gone, and who is to tell mother—she that trained me up always to be honest?’

Here poor Joe fairly broke down, and Ralph said indignantly, in his most grown-up way, ‘I don’t believe a word of it, policeman; there must be some mistake.’

‘Don’t you indeed, young sir?’ said the giant policeman, smiling contemptuously. ‘If you had lived as long as me you wouldn’t be so quick to say you didn’t believe things. Besides, I’m only taking him up on suspicion, so he needn’t be in such a taking. If he can prove that he is innocent, let him prove it. But it appears that this pistol must have been stolen out of the house, and it’s found hidden in a hole in a tree, wrapped in a cap which ’e owns is ’is, and to my mind it’s as plain that he stole it as that two and two make four, though as to connecting it with the robbery, well, that’s a different matter.’

‘It’s all the same,’ sobbed Joe, ‘whether I’m taken up on suspicion or whether they are sure of it. My character’s gone, for who will take a lad in who has been took up by the police? And who will look after my mother, for she is so bad with the rhumatiz that she can’t do anything for herself?’

‘Come, come,’ said the policeman, stepping forward a little quicker, for already a small crowd of children was gathering, and he did not want a scene. ‘Hold your tongue, and come along.—As for you, young gentlemen, I would advise you to go home. What he says may be true enough. He may know nothing about it, but that remains to be proved; and often the most innocent-looking ones are the most artful.’

‘It’s a blooming shame, Joe,’ repeated Ralph.

Ronald took the lad’s hand kindly in his own. ‘I believe what you say, Joe, and if you tell the truth it will all come right,’ he said.

But Vivian stood silent, utterly tongue-tied. It was true that he had not been found out; but already his punishment was heavy, for it was almost more than he could bear to have to stand by and see an innocent lad led off to prison for his fault.

‘What a nice finish up to the holidays!’ said Ralph as they walked slowly homewards. ‘The house broken into, and every one as cross as two sticks, and Isobel ill, and now Joe taken up. It is enough to give a fellow the blues. It is a good thing that there is Mrs Seton-Kinaird’s party to look forward to.’

‘Do you think that we will go,’ said Ronald gravely, ‘now that Isobel is so ill? I was just wondering if I oughtn’t to write and tell mother that we are going home. I’m sure Aunt Dora would be glad to have fewer of us in the house.’

‘Oh, don’t do that till after the party,’ said Ralph, who did not like the idea of being left alone with only little Claude for company. ‘You are going home on Wednesday anyhow, and I expect Isobel will be a lot better to-morrow. It isn’t as if it were anything infectious.’

But when they reached the house they were met by news that put all thoughts of the party out of their minds. The door was opened by Mary, and her eyes were as red and swollen as Joe’s had been, but from a very different cause.

‘You have to go up the back stairs,’ she said in a husky whisper, ‘and be as quiet as you possibly can. Poor little Miss Isobel is dreadfully ill, and they say that it all depends upon her being kept quiet; and she does get so excited at the least little bit of a sound.’

‘Have they sent for Dr Robson again?’ asked Ralph, for they could hear the doctor’s voice as he stood talking to Mr Osbourne in the corridor just outside Isobel’s room.

‘Yes,’ said Mary with a sob; ‘the poor lamb took much worse just after he had gone; she got so excited, and talked so fast, we could hear her all over the house. She would have it that she was playing in the garden with you, Master Vivian, and with little Master Claude, and Master Claude heard her, and began to cry, and that made her worse, so Anne put on his coat and has taken him over to Mrs Anstey’s. He will be quite happy there playing with the other children, and I am to go and sleep with him at night.’

‘And has Dr Robson been here all this time?’ asked the boys, awed and startled by the thought that Isobel could be ill enough to need such attention, and yet feeling somehow that it was all a bad dream, and that they would suddenly wake up and find her merry, mischievous face at their elbows.

‘Yes, he has,’ said Mary with a sigh; ‘and they have sent for an hospital nurse and a big doctor from London, Sir Somebody Something—I forget his name. And they have telegraphed for your father, Master Ronald; I heard master order the carriage to go and meet him at Victoria; they expect him by the four o’clock train.’

Vivian waited to hear no more. Regardless of Mary’s warning, ‘You were to stay here in the schoolroom, Master Vivian,’ he rushed away as noiselessly as he could to his own room, feeling that he must be alone, and that he must have time to think. He was not crying—tears seemed far away; but he felt as if some terrible darkness were settling round him, a darkness with no light in it. He was a thief, Joe had been taken up, and now Isobel was dying. In after years Vivian looked back on that moment as the blackest and most desperate of his whole life.

‘You’d better go after him, Master Ronald, and see where he has gone to,’ whispered Mary, ‘and I will stay here with Master Ralph. Only keep him quietly in his room, or else bring him back here, for you mustn’t be waiting about the corridor. Master said you weren’t to do that on any account. They have Miss Isobel’s door and window open, and she hears the slightest sound, though she doesn’t know anybody.’

‘Mary, will she die?’

The question forced itself from Ronald’s quivering lips in spite of himself, and in spite of a protesting groan from Ralph, who had flung himself face downwards on the hearthrug. He had never realised before how dear the unselfish little sister was to him; and now his conscience was speaking very plainly, and telling him that it was she who had always done things for him, and that he had taken very little trouble to try and give her pleasure.

‘Girls are made to fag for their brothers’ had been the cry of the boys at school, and he had thought it a fine thing to believe it, and to act upon it; but somehow everything looked different to-day.

‘She is in God’s hands, Master Ronald,’ answered Mary unsteadily, ‘and everything will be done for her that they can do, but’—— She did not finish the sentence, and her kind eyes filled with tears.

The same question which he had just asked Mary awaited Ronald when he reached his room, where Vivian sat huddled up on the deep window-seat, looking out at the bright sunshine with dull, unseeing eyes.

Ronald did not answer him. He could not; the whole thing seemed too terrible to be true, and yet in his heart he knew that Mary thought that his little cousin was dying. That was why she was crying, and that was why they had telegraphed for his father.

He crossed the room in silence, and stood beside his brother, looking out like him at the golden sunlight, which was turning every frosted twig into a spray of diamonds, and wondering at the contrast between the brightness which lay over everything out of doors, and the shadow which was darkening and saddening the house.

But Vivian would not let him remain silent. ‘Speak, Ronald, speak!’ he cried, taking hold of Ronald’s arm and shaking it in his excitement. ‘She won’t die; she mustn’t. Why, she was at the Hippodrome the other night, and she was as well as any of us. She can’t die yet; people don’t die so quickly.’

Just then a sound reached their ears which made the words die away on Vivian’s lips. It was the sound of a weak, quavering little voice calling out ‘Vivian, Vivian! let us run and hide.’ It was Isobel, poor child, thinking, in her delirium, that she was once more playing in the garden.

The boys knew her voice in a moment, but how sadly it was changed! Somehow the sound of it calmed Vivian’s excitement, and he laid his head against his brother’s shoulder and began to sob in a dull, hopeless way.

God was beginning to punish him, he thought, not in the way he had expected by the discovery of his sin, but in a far more terrible way. First of all he had caused suspicion to fall on Joe, and Joe was going to be put in prison, and now He was taking Isobel away, and the punishment which should have fallen on him—Vivian—alone, was going to fall on Aunt Dora, and Uncle Walter, and Ralph, and little Claude.

‘Suppose we say our prayers, Vivi,’ said Ronald with a break in his voice. ‘If Jesus could bring back Jairus’ little daughter, He can make Isobel better; and it is the only thing we can do to help.’

‘You can if you like,’ said Vivian, hopeless; ‘but it would be no good for me to do it. I’m not good enough.’

‘No more am I,’ said Ronald humbly; ‘but mother says that it isn’t our goodness or badness that matters; it is if we really mean what we say, and it is “for Jesus’ sake,” you know,’ he added shyly, for neither of the boys were wont to talk much about religion.

Vivian made no answer, so Ronald knelt down and said some simple prayers for both of them—the prayers he had learned to say at his mother’s knee when he was a little fellow, and which he had never changed: ‘Our Father,’ and then the Collect for protection from danger, and then he hesitated, and added a little broken prayer in his own words that Isobel might be made better, then came the Benediction.

The solemn words brought a curious feeling of strength and safety to Ronald, and he rose from his knees with fresh hope and trust. The same loving Master who had healed the little Galilean maiden so many hundreds of years ago was as near and as powerful to-day, only Vivian and he could not see Him, but they had told Him their trouble, and already to Ronald’s boyish heart came the promise of relief.

But Vivian felt none of this. The words which had comforted Ronald only made him feel more miserable. How could he pray to ‘be kept from sin, and from falling into any kind of danger,’ or how could he expect God to hear him or to answer his prayer for Isobel’s recovery when a burden of falsehood and theft lay on his conscience, which he had not the courage to confess, and for which innocent people were suffering?

No, Ronald’s prayer might be heeded, for Ronald was always true and loving and dutiful, even although he was a trifle slow at times; but there was no chance whatever of God hearing, or at least paying any attention to, the prayers of a liar and a thief.

Poor little miserable boy! he could not imagine that the mere fact that he had faced his sin, and called it by its right name, and had not tried to make excuses even to himself, was the first step towards that repentance and confession which at present seemed so impossible to him.

Presently Mary came quietly in to tell them that dinner was ready; and although they all protested that they could not eat anything, it is wonderful how a boy’s appetite comes back at the sight of roast turkey and a rolly-polly pudding. Afterwards, however, when the table was cleared, and Mary had disappeared downstairs with the dishes, time hung heavily enough.

Ralph, as usual, took refuge from his troubles in a book; and Ronald, acting on a remark which Mary had made, that if Dr Armitage returned home that night he would probably take the two boys with him, went back to his room to put his own clothes and his brother’s in something like order, in case his father decided to do this. So Vivian was left to his own thoughts, and very sad and sorrowful ones they were.

The long afternoon wore slowly away. Now and then a door opened or shut, but the watchers by Isobel’s bed were far too anxious to spare a thought for the three lonely boys in the schoolroom. At half-past three Mason wheeled the carriage out, and began to get it ready for the station. Vivian could see him from the schoolroom window; could see, too, Monarch’s empty kennel, and the great round hole in the glass of the conservatory which the burglars had cut last night. The sight sent his thoughts back to the summer-house and the man with the green patch over his eye. Could it have been only yesterday morning he had spoken to him? What a long, long time ago it seemed! Even the burglary seemed an old story, something that happened long ago, before the awful news had been told to him that Isobel was dying, that God was going to take her away as a punishment for his wickedness. Poor little mistaken lad, how the Great Father must have pitied him as He looked down and saw the image of Himself which Vivian was forming in his heart, an image so different from the Perfect Love which the Christ had come to earth to declare.

At last the carriage rolled out of the yard, and everything was quiet again, and presently Ronald came back and joined him at the window.

‘I have packed everything except our brushes and combs and our sleeping suits,’ he said. ‘They can be put in in a moment if father wants us to go home; but somehow I fancy he will wait till to-morrow to hear what the big doctor says. He can’t come till late this evening. He has had to go into the country. Anne told me so; I met her on the stairs.

‘Just look at poor Monarch’s kennel,’ he went on. ‘It is a good thing that Isobel doesn’t know that he is dead; it might vex her. I heard her calling out to him as I passed her door just now. I expect she thinks that she is playing with him.’

‘And he is dead and buried,’ said Vivian, and then he shivered. That was his doing, as well as the rest.

Ronald looked at him anxiously. ‘Come nearer the fire,’ he said. ‘You have stood there until you are cold, and it is dreary looking out now that the sun is gone. I wish Mary or some one would come and light the gas.’

It was five o’clock, and they were having tea when the carriage came back. The table looked just as it had done at the same time a week before, for Mary, anxious to make things as cheerful as possible, had been generous with cakes and jam.

‘It is just a week ago to-night since you came,’ said Ralph, as the wheels stopped, and a subdued bustle was heard in the hall, then he stopped abruptly as the contrast between that night and this struck him, and for a moment nobody spoke except Mary, who suddenly woke up to the fact that it was time that somebody was asking for more tea.

Dr Armitage must have gone right upstairs with Uncle Walter, for no one came near the schoolroom for nearly half-an-hour, and when the door opened at last it was not he who came softly in, but his wife; and at the sight of her dear sweet face her two boys realised all at once how long it was—a whole week—since they had seen her, and wondered how they could have stayed away from her so long.

‘Oh mother!’ cried Ronald, jumping up in surprise and pulling her down beside him on his seat; and then for a moment he could say no more, but could only squeeze her hand; while Vivian, much to every one’s astonishment, turned his face away from the table and burst into a torrent of loud, frightened sobs.

‘Hush, Vivian!’ said his father, who had come into the room unnoticed along with Mr Osbourne. ‘You must control yourself, my boy; we cannot have a noise like that here.’

But his mother had stretched out her hand and drawn him gently to her.

‘Take Jack down to the study and have your tea there, Walter,’ she said; ‘Anne will see after you, and we will stay up here a little by ourselves. We can have a quarter of an hour’s talk; and I will have the boys quite ready by half-past six.

‘Now we will be cosy,’ she said, drawing up a low chair to the fire, and sitting down on it. ‘You too, Ralph; here is room for you on the floor at this side. Vivi can sit on my knee if he doesn’t think he is too big.’

Vivian, however, who was still sobbing, preferred to sit on the floor, and to hide his hot face in his mother’s dress, and she wisely took no notice, knowing that he would recover himself more quickly if she left him alone. ‘What a long, weary, troubled day you must have had!’ she said softly; ‘but Aunt Dora has told me how good you have been, and how little trouble you have given.’

‘How did you manage to leave Dorothy, mother?’ asked Ronald, instinctively keeping clear of the subject which was uppermost in all their minds.

‘Nicely,’ answered his mother with a smile. ‘I promised her that, if she would be a very good girl, father would bring her her Ronnie back,’ and she looked down at her eldest son with a little smile, ‘and Vivi too,’ she added, putting her hand tenderly on the little black head which was half-hidden in the folds of her soft gray gown. ‘She has missed you both so terribly that she was willing to promise anything so long as she had the prospect of getting you back. I am sure I don’t know what she will do when you go to school.’

‘Then we are going home with father,’ said Ronald. Mary thought we might, so I have packed nearly all our things.’

‘That was my good, thoughtful boy,’ said his mother. ‘I asked Anne to see to your things; but she is so busy I am glad there will not be much for her to do.’

‘Are you going to stay here then?’ asked Vivian, speaking for the first time.

‘Yes, sonnie, for a day or two, to help auntie to nurse Isobel. So Ronald and you must do the best you can at home, and look after father and little Dorothy.’

The tears came into Mrs Armitage’s eyes as she thought how very little more nursing her little niece was likely to need, but for every one’s sake she tried to speak as cheerfully as possible. It was clear that Isobel, in falling, had hurt her back as well as her head, and Dr Armitage had only been able sorrowfully to confirm what Dr Robson had feared: that there was very little hope that she would live through the night. It was evident from the symptoms that inflammation had set in, and if that could not be speedily checked the end could not be far off.

‘Is father not going to stay too?’ asked Ronald; but his mother shook her head.

‘He must go home, dearie. He had a very anxious case down in the village, and can’t be spared; besides, he can do no good here. All is being done that can be done, and we are going to wire Sir Antony Jones’s opinion to him. He will be here at eight o’clock, so the message will be at home almost as soon as you are.’

‘What does Uncle Jack say about Isobel?’ The question came from Ralph, and Mrs Armitage hesitated before she answered it.

‘She is very ill, dearie,’ she said at last gently; ‘but she is in God’s hands, and we must try to be content to leave her there. We can be quite sure that He will do what is best for us all.’

‘Would it have made any difference if we had told,’ asked Ronald—‘if they had known at the very first—that she had fallen?’

‘Perhaps it might, but we cannot say. That is past now, and it is no good looking back. You did not mean to conceal anything, so you cannot blame yourselves; but remember it is always better to be open and frank, for you never know what mischief may follow if you try to hush a matter up. But I think it is time that you were getting on your greatcoats, boys, and seeing if Anne has finished your packing, and strapped your portmanteau. The carriage will be round in ten minutes, and I have some things I must say to your father.’