The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered. But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realise that any one else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence.

Their mother met them at the door. She bubbled questions: John chattered ponies, but Emily was still tongue-tied. She was, in her mind, like a child who has eaten too much even to be able to be sick.

Mrs. Thornton got a little worried about her at times. This sort of life was very peaceful, and might be excellent for nervy children like John: but a child like Emily, thought Mrs. Thornton, who is far from nervy, really needs some sort of stimulus and excitement, or there is a danger of her mind going to sleep altogether for ever. This life was too vegetable. Consequently Mrs. Thornton always spoke to Emily in her brightest manner, as if everything was of the greatest possible interest.She had hoped, too, the visit to Exeter might liven her up: but she had come back as silent and expressionless as ever. It had evidently made no impression on her at all.

John marshalled the small ones in the cellar, and round and round they marched, wooden swords at the slope, singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ Emily did not join them. What did it now matter, that earlier woe, that being a girl she could never when grown up become a real soldier with a real sword? She had been in an Earthquake.

Nor did the others keep it up very long. (Sometimes they would go on for three or four hours.) For, whatever it might have done for Emily’s soul, the earthquake had done little to clear the air. It was as hot as ever. In the animal world there seemed some strange commotion, as if they had wind of something. The usual lizards and mosquitoes were still absent: but in their place the earth’s most horrid progeny, creatures of darkness, sought the open: land-crabs wandered about aimlessly, angrily twiddling their claws: and the ground seemed almost alive with red ants and cockroaches. Up on the roof the pigeons were gathered, talking to each other fearfully.

The cellar (or rather, ground floor), where they were playing, had no communication with the wooden structure above, but had an opening ofits own under the twin flight of steps leading to the front door; and there the children presently gathered in the shadow. Out in the compound lay one of Mr. Thornton’s best handkerchiefs. He must have dropped it that morning. But none of them felt the energy to go and retrieve it, out into the sun. Then, as they stood there, they saw Lame-foot Sam come limping across the yard. Seeing the prize, he was about to carry it off. Suddenly he remembered it was Sunday. He dropped it like a hot brick, and began to cover it with sand, exactly where he had found it.

‘Please God, I thieve you to-morrow,’ he explained hopefully. ‘Please God, you still there?’

A low mutter of thunder seemed to offer grudging assent.

‘Thank you, Lord,’ said Sam, bowing to a low bank of cloud. He hobbled off: but then, not too sure perhaps that Heaven would keep Its promise, changed his mind: snatched up the handkerchief and made off for his cottage. The thunder muttered louder and more angrily: but Sam ignored the warning.

It was the custom that, whenever Mr. Thornton had been to St. Anne’s, John and Emily should run out to meet him, and ride back with him, one perched on each of his stirrups.

That Sunday evening they ran out as soon asthey saw him coming, in spite of the thunderstorm that by now was clattering over their very heads—and not only over their heads either, for in the Tropics a thunderstorm is not a remote affair up in the sky, as it is in England, but is all round you: lightning plays ducks and drakes across the water, bounds from tree to tree, bounces about the ground, while the thunder seems to proceed from violent explosions in your own very core.

‘Go back! Go back, you damned little fools!’ he yelled furiously: ‘Get into the house!’

They stopped, aghast: and began to realise that after all it was a storm of more than ordinary violence. They discovered that they were drenched to the skin—must have been the moment they left the house. The lightning kept up a continuous blaze: it was playing about their father’s very stirrup-irons; and all of a sudden they realised that he was afraid. They fled to the house, shocked to the heart: and he was in the house almost as soon as they were. Mrs. Thornton rushed out:

‘My dear, I’m so glad....’

‘I’ve never seen such a storm! Why on earth did you let the children come out?’

‘I never dreamt they would be so silly! And all the time I was thinking—but thank Heaven you’re back!’

‘I think the worst is over now.’

Perhaps it was; but all through supper the lightning shone almost without flickering. And John and Emily could hardly eat: the memory of that momentary look on their father’s face haunted them.

It was an unpleasant meal altogether. Mrs. Thornton had prepared for her husband his ‘favourite dish’: than which no action could more annoy a man of whim. In the middle of it all in burst Sam, ceremony dropped: he flung the handkerchief angrily on the table and stumped out.

‘What on earth ...’ began Mr. Thornton.

But John and Emily knew: and thoroughly agreed with Sam as to the cause of the storm. Stealing was bad enough anyway, but on a Sunday!

Meanwhile, the lightning kept up its play. The thunder made talking arduous, but no one was anyhow in a mood to chatter. Only thunder was heard, and the hammering of the rain. But suddenly, close under the window, there burst out the most appalling inhuman shriek of terror.

‘Tabby!’ cried John, and they all rushed to the window.

But Tabby had already flashed into the house: and behind him was a whole club of wild cats in hot pursuit. John momentarily opened the dining-room door and puss slipped in, dishevelledand panting. Not even then did the brutes desist: what insane fury led these jungle creatures to pursue him into the very house is unimaginable; but there they were, in the passage, caterwauling in concert: and as if at their incantation the thunder awoke anew, and the lightning nullified the meagre table lamp. It was such a din as you could not speak through. Tabby, his fur on end, pranced up and down the room, his eyes blazing, talking and sometimes exclaiming in a tone of voice the children had never heard him use before and which made their blood run cold. He seemed like one inspired in the presence of Death, he had gone utterly Delphic: and without in the passage Hell’s pandemonium reigned terrifically.

The check could only be a short one. Outside the door stood the big filter, and above the door the fanlight was long since broken. Something black and yelling flashed through the fanlight, landing clean in the middle of the supper table, scattering the forks and spoons and upsetting the lamp. And another and another—but already Tabby was through the window and streaking again for the bush. The whole dozen of those wild cats leapt one after the other from the top of the filter clean through the fanlight onto the supper table, and away from there only too hot in his tracks: ina moment the whole devil-hunt and its hopeless quarry had vanished into the night.

‘Oh Tabby, my darling Tabby!’ wailed John; while Emily rushed again to the window.

They were gone. The lightning behind the creepers in the jungle lit them up like giant cobwebs: but of Tabby and his pursuers there was nothing to be seen.

John burst into tears, the first time for several years, and flung himself on his mother: Emily stood transfixed at the window, her eyes glued in horror on what she could not, in fact, see: and all of a sudden was sick.

‘God, what an evening!’ groaned Mr. Bas-Thornton, groping in the darkness for what might be left of their supper.

Shortly after that Sam’s hut burst into flames. They saw, from the dining-room, the old negro stagger dramatically out into the darkness. He was throwing stones at the sky. In a lull they heard him cry: ‘I gib it back, didn’t I? I gib de nasty t’ing back?’

Then there was another blinding flash, and Sam fell where he stood. Mr. Thornton pulled the children roughly back and said something like ‘I’ll go and see. Keep them from the window.’

Then he closed and barred the shutters, and was gone.

John and the little ones kept up a continuous sobbing. Emily wished some one would light a lamp, she wanted to read. Anything, so as not to think about poor Tabby.

I suppose the wind must have begun to rise some while before this, but now, by the time Mr. Thornton had managed to carry old Sam’s body into the house, it was more than a gale. The old man, stiff in the joints as he might have been in life, had gone as limp as a worm. Emily and John, who had slipped unbeknownst into the passage, were thrilled beyond measure at the way he dangled: they could hardly tear themselves away, and be back in the dining-room, before they should be discovered.

There Mrs. Thornton sat heroically in a chair, her brood all grouped round her, saying the Psalms, and the poems of Sir Walter Scott, over by heart: while Emily tried to keep her mind off Tabby by going over in her head all the details of her Earthquake. At times the din, the rocketing of the thunder and torrential shriek of the wind, became so loud as almost to impinge on her inner world: she wished this wretched thunderstorm would hurry up and get over. First she held an actual performance of the earthquake, went over it direct, as if it was again happening. Then she put it into Oratio Recta, told it as a story, beginningwith that magic phrase, ‘Once I was in an Earthquake.’ But before long the dramatic element reappeared—this time, the awed comments of her imaginary English audience. When that was done, she put it into the Historical—a Voice, declaring that a girl called Emily was once in an Earthquake. And so on, right through the whole thing a third time.

The horrid fate of poor Tabby appeared suddenly before her eyes, caught her unawares: and she was all but sick again. Even her earthquake had failed her. Caught by the incubus, her mind struggled frantically to clutch at even the outside world, as an only remaining straw. She tried to fix her interest on every least detail of the scene around her—to count the slats in the shutters, any least detail that wasoutward. So it was that for the first time she really began to notice the weather.

The wind by now was more than redoubled. The shutters were bulging as if tired elephants were leaning against them, and Father was trying to tie the fastening with that handkerchief. But to push against this wind was like pushing against rock. The handkerchief, shutters, everything burst: the rain poured in like the sea into a sinking ship, the wind occupied the room, snatching pictures from the wall, sweeping the table bare. Through the gaping frames the lightning-lit scenewithout was visible. The creepers, which before had looked like cobwebs, now streamed up into the sky like new-combed hair. Bushes were lying flat, laid back on the ground as close as a rabbit lays back his ears. Branches were leaping about loose in the sky. The negro huts were clean gone, and the negroes crawling on their stomachs across the compound to gain the shelter of the house. The bouncing rain seemed to cover the ground with a white smoke, a sort of sea in which the blacks wallowed like porpoises. One nigger-boy began to roll away: his mother, forgetting caution, rose to her feet: and immediately the fat old beldam was blown clean away, bowling along across fields and hedgerows like some one in a funny fairy-story, till she fetched up against a wall and was pinned there, unable to move. But the others managed to reach the house, and soon could be heard in the cellar underneath.

Moreover the very floor began to ripple, as a loose carpet will ripple on a gusty day: in opening the cellar door the blacks had let the wind in, and now for some time they could not shut it again. The wind, to push against, was more like a solid block than a current of air.

Mr. Thornton went round the house—to see what could be done, he said. He soon realised that the next thing to go would be the roof. Sohe returned to the Niobe-group in the dining-room. Mrs. Thornton was half-way throughThe Lady of the Lake, the smaller children listening with rapt attention. Exasperated, he told them that they would probably not be alive in half an hour. No one seemed particularly interested in his news: Mrs. Thornton continued her recitation with faultless memory.

After another couple of cantos the threatened roof went. Fortunately, the wind taking it from inside, most of it was blown clear of the house: but one of the couples collapsed skew-eyed, and was hung up on what was left of the dining-room door—within an ace of hitting John. Emily, to her intense resentment, suddenly felt cold. All at once, she found she had had enough of the storm: it had become intolerable, instead of a welcome distraction.

Mr. Thornton began to look for something to break through the floor. If only he could make a hole in it, he might get his wife and children down into the cellar. Fortunately he did not have to look far: one arm of the fallen couple had already done the work for him. Laura, Rachel, Emily, Edward and John, Mrs. Thornton and finally Mr. Thornton himself, were passed down into the darkness already thronged with negroes and goats.

With great good sense, Mr. Thornton broughtwith him from the room above a couple of decanters of madeira, and every one had a swig, from Laura to the oldest negro. All the children made the most of this unholy chance, but somehow to Emily the bottle got passed twice, and each time she took a good pull. It was enough, at their age; and while what was left of the house was blown away over their heads, through the lull and the ensuing aerial return match, John, Emily, Edward, Rachel, and Laura, blind drunk, slept in a heap on the cellar floor: a sleep over which the appalling fate of Tabby, torn to pieces by those fiends almost under their very eyes, dominated with the easy empire of nightmare.

ALL night the water poured through the house floor onto the people sheltering below: but (perhaps owing to the madeira) it did them no harm. Shortly after the second bout of blowing, however, the rain stopped; and when dawn came Mr. Thornton crept out to assess the damage.

The country was quite unrecognisable, as if it had been swept by a spate. You could hardly tell, geographically speaking, where you were. It is vegetation which gives the character to a tropic landscape, not the shape of the ground: and all the vegetation, for miles, was now pulp. The ground itself had been ploughed up by instantaneous rivers, biting deep into the red earth. The only living thing in sight was a cow: and she had lost both her horns.

The wooden part of the house was nearly all gone. After they had succeeded in reaching shelter, one wall after another had blown down. The furniture was splintered into matchwood. Even the heavy mahogany dining-table, which they loved, and had always kept with its legs in little glass baths of oil to defeat the ants, was spirited rightaway. There were some fragments which might be part of it, or they might not: you could not tell.

Mr. Thornton returned to the cellar and helped his wife out: she was so cramped as hardly to be able to move. They knelt down together and thanked God for not having treated them any worse. Then they stood up and stared about them rather stupidly. It seemed not credible that all this had been done by a current of air. Mr. Thornton patted the atmosphere with his hand. When still, it was so soft, so rare: how could one believe that Motion, itself something impalpable, had lent it a hardness: that this gentle, hind-like Meteor should have last night seized Fat Betsy with the rapacity of a tiger and the lift of a roc, and flung her, as he had seen her flung, across two fair-sized fields?

Mrs. Thornton understood his gesture.

‘Remember who is its Prince,’ she said.

The stable was damaged, though not completely destroyed: and Mr. Thornton’s mule was so much hurt he had to tell a negro to cut its throat. The buggy was smashed beyond repair. The only building undamaged was a stone chamber which had been the hospital of the old sugar-estate: so they woke the children, who were feeling ill and beyond words unhappy, and moved into this:where the negroes, with an unexpected energy and kindliness, did everything they could to make them comfortable. It was paved and unlighted: but solid.

The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically without noticing it. It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realise what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives. If Emily had known this was aHurricane, she would doubtless have been far more impressed, for the word was full of romantic terrors. But it never entered her head: and a thunderstorm, however severe, is after all a commonplace affair. The mere fact that it had done incalculable damage, while the earthquake had done none at all, gave it no right whatever to rival the latter in the hierarchy of cataclysms: an Earthquake is a thing apart. If she was silent, and inclined to brood over some inward terror, it was not the hurricane she was thinking of, it was the death of Tabby. That, at times, seemed a horror beyond all bearing. It was her first intimate contact with death—and a death of violence, too. The death of Old Sam had no such effect: there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a favourite cat.

There was something enjoyable, too, in camping in the hospital: a sort of everlasting picnic in which their parents for once were taking part. Indeed it led them to begin for the first time to regard their parents as rational human beings, with understandable tastes—such as sitting on the floor to eat one’s dinner.

It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children. She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the centre of their passionate devotion. Actually, she was congenitally incapable of telling one end of a child from the other. She was a dumpy little woman—Cornish, I believe. When she was herself a baby she was so small they carried her about on a cushion for fear a clumsy human arm might damage her. She could read when she was two and a half. Her reading was always serious. Nor had she been backward in the humaner studies: her mistresses spoke of her Deportment as something rarely seen outside the older Royal Houses: in spite of a figure like a bolster, she could step into a coach like an angelgetting onto a cloud. She was very quick-tempered.

Mr. Bas-Thornton also had every accomplishment, except two: that of primogeniture, and that of making a living. Either would have provided for them.

If it would have surprised the mother, it would undoubtedly have surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis: whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children had loved Tabby first and foremost in all the world, some of each other second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the ceremony of riding home on his stirrups.

Jamaica remained, and blossomed anew, its womb being inexhaustible. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton remained, and with patience and tears tried to reconstruct things, in so far as they could be reconstructed. But the danger which their beloved little ones had been through was not a thing to risk again. Heaven had warned them. The children must go.

Nor was the only danger physical.

‘That awful night!’ said Mrs. Thornton, once,when discussing their plan of sending them home to school: ‘Oh my dear, what the poor little things must have suffered! Think how much more acute Fear is to a child! And they were so brave, so English.’

‘I don’t believe they realised it.’ (He only said that to be contradictious: he could hardly expect it to be taken seriously.)

‘You know, I am terribly afraid what permanent,inwardeffect a shock like that may have on them. Have you noticed they never so much as mention it? In England they would at least be safe from dangers of that sort.’

Meanwhile the children, accepting the new life as a matter of course, were thoroughly enjoying it. Most children, on a railway journey, prefer to change at as many stations as possible.

The rebuilding of Ferndale, too, was a matter of absorbing interest. For there is one advantage to these match-box houses—easy gone, easy come: and once begun, the work proceeded apace. Mr. Thornton himself led the building gang, employing no end of mechanical devices of his own devising, and it was not long before the day came when he stood with his handsome head emerging through the fast dwindling hole in the new roof, shouting directions to the two black carpenters, who, lying spread-eagle in their check shirts,pinned on shingle after shingle—walling him in, like the victim in some horrid story. At last he had to draw in his head, and where it had been the last few shingles were clapped into place.

An hour later the children had looked their last on Ferndale.

When they had been told they were to go to England, they had received it as an isolated fact: thrilling in itself, but without any particular causation—for it could hardly be due to the death of the cat, and nothing else of importance had occurred lately.

The first stage of their journey was by land, to Montego Bay, and the notable thing about it was that the borrowed wagonette was drawn not by a pair of horses or a pair of mules, but by one horse and one mule. Whenever the horse wanted to go fast the mule fell asleep in the shafts: and if the driver woke it up it set off at a gallop, which angered the horse. Their progress would have been slow anyhow, as all the roads were washed away.

John was the only one who could remember England. What he remembered was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, which was fenced off from him by a little gate, playing with a red toy milk-cart: and he knew, without having to look, that in the room on the left Baby Emily was lyingin her cot. Emilysaidshe could remember something which sounded like a Prospect of the Backs of some Brick Houses at Richmond: but she might have invented it. The others had been born in the Island—Edward only just.

They all had, nevertheless, most elaborate ideas about England, built up out of what their parents had told them, and from the books and old magazines they sometimes looked at. Needless to say it was a very Atlantis, a land at the back of the North Wind: and going there was about as exciting as it would be to die and go to Heaven.

John told them all about the top of the stairs for the hundredth time as they drove along; the others listening attentively (as the Believing do to a man remembering his reincarnations).

Suddenly Emily recalled sitting at a window and seeing a big bird with a beautiful tail. At the same time there had been a horrid screeching going on, or perhaps something else disagreeable—she could not quite remember which sense was offended. It did not occur to her that it was this self-same bird which had screeched: and anyhow it was all too vague for her to try to describe it. She switched off to wondering how it was possible actually tosleepwhen walking, as the driver said the mule did.

They put up for the first night at St. Anne’s, and there another notable thing occurred. Their host was a hardened Creole: and at supper he ate Cayenne pepper with a spoon. Not ordinary Cayenne pepper, mind, such as is sold in shops, which is heavily adulterated with log-wood: but the far fierier pure original. This indeed was an Event of the first water: none of them ever forgot it.

The desolation through which they drove is indescribable. Tropical scenery is anyhow tedious, prolific, and gross: the greens more or less uniform: great tubular stems supporting thick leaves: no tree has an outline because it is crushed up against something else—noroom. In Jamaica this profusion swarms over the very mountain ranges: and even the peaks are so numerous that on the top of one you are surrounded by others, and can see nothing. There are hundreds of flowers. Then imagine all this luxuriance smashed, as with a pestle and mortar—crushed, pulped, and already growing again! Mr. Thornton and his wife were ready to shout with relief when they caught their first glimpse of the sea, and at last came out in view of the whole beautiful sweep of Montego Bay itself.

In the open sea there was a considerable swell: but within the shelter of the coral reef, with its pinhole entrance, all was still as a mirror, wherethree ships of different sizes lay at anchor, the whole of each beautiful machine repeated in the water under it. Within the Roads lay the Bogue Islands; and immediately to the left of the islands, in the low land at the base of the hills, was the mouth of a small river—swampy, and (Mr. Thornton informed John) infested with crocodiles. The children had never seen a crocodile, and hoped one might venture as far as the town, where they presently arrived: but none did. It was with considerable disappointment that they found they were to go on board the barque at once; for they still hoped that round some corner of the street a crocodile might yet appear.

TheClorindahad let go her anchor in six fathoms: the water so clear, and the light so bright, that as they drew near the reflection suddenly disappeared, and instead they found themselves looking right underneath her and out the other side. The refraction made her seem as flat-bellied as a turtle, as if practically all of her were above the surface: and the anchor on its cable seemed to stream out flatly, like a downwards kite, twisting and twining (owing to the undulating surface) in the writhing coral.

This was the only impression Emily retained of going on board the ship: but the ship itself was a strange enough object, requiring all her attention.John was the only one who could remember the journey out at all clearly. Emily thought she could, but was really only remembering her visualisations of what she had been told: in fact, she found that a real ship was totally unlike the thing she thought she remembered.

By some last whim of the captain’s the shrouds were being set up—tauter than seemed good to the sailors, who grumbled as they strained the creaking lanyards. John did not envy them, winding away at that handle in the hot sun: but he did envy the chap whose job it was to dip his hand in a great pot of aromatic Stockholm tar, and work it into the dead-eyes. He was tarred up to the elbows: and John itched to be so too.

In a moment the children were scattered all over the ship, smelling here, miaowing, sniffing there, like cats in a new home. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton stood by the main companion-way, a little disconsolate at their children’s happy preoccupation, a little regretting the lack of proper emotional scene.

‘I think they will be happy here, Frederic,’ said Mrs. Thornton. ‘I wish we could have afforded to send them by the steamboat: but children find amusement even in discomfort.’

Mr. Thornton grunted.

‘I wish schools had never been invented!’ hesuddenly burst out: ‘they wouldn’t then be so indispensable!’

There was a short pause for the logic of this to cross the footlights: then he went on:

‘I know what will happen; they’ll come away ...mugs! Just ordinary little mugs, like any one else’s brats! I’m dashed if I don’t think a hundred hurricanes would be better than that.’

Mrs. Thornton shuddered: but she continued bravely:

‘You know, I think they were getting almosttoodevoted to us? We have been such an unrivalled centre of their lives and thoughts. It doesn’t do for minds developing to be completely dependent on one person.’

Captain Marpole’s grizzled head emerged from the scuttle. A sea-dog: clear blue eyes of a translucent trustworthiness: a merry, wrinkled, morocco-coloured face: a rumbling voice.

‘He’s too good to be true,’ whispered Mrs. Thornton.

‘Not at all! It’s a sophism to imagine people don’t conform to type!’ barked Mr. Thornton. He felt at sixes and sevens.

Captain Marpole certainly looked the ideal Children’s Captain. He would, Mrs. Thornton decided, be careful without being fussy—for she was all in favour of courageous gymnastics, thoughglad she would not have to witness them herself. Captain Marpole cast his eyes benignantly over the swarming imps.

‘They’ll worship him,’ she whispered to her husband. (She meant, of course, that he would worship them.) It was an important point, this, of the captain: important as the personality of a headmaster.

‘So that’s the nursery, eh?’ said the captain, crushing Mrs. Thornton’s hand. She strove to answer, but found her throat undoubtedly paralysed. Even Mr. Thornton’s ready tongue was at a loss. He looked hard at the captain, jerked his thumb towards the children, wrestled in his mind with an elaborate speech, and finally enunciated in a small, unlikely voice:

‘Smack ’em.’

Then the captain had to go about his duties: and for an hour the father and mother sat disconsolately on the main-hatch, quite deserted. Even when all was ready for departure it was impossible to muster the flock for a collective good-bye.

Already the tug was fulminating in its gorge: and ashore they must go. Emily and John had been captured, and stood talking uneasily to their parents, as if to strangers, using only a quarter of their minds. With a rope to be climbed dangling before his very nose, John simply did notknow how this delay was to be supported, and lapsed into complete silence.

‘Time to go ashore, Ma’am,’ said the captain: ‘we must be off now.’

Very formally the two generations kissed each other, and said farewell. Indeed the elders were already at the gangway before the meaning of it all dawned in Emily’s head. She rushed after her mother, gripped her ample flesh in two strong fists, and sobbed and wept, ‘Come too, Mother, oh, do come too!’

Honestly, it had only occurred to her that very moment that this was aparting.

‘But think what an adventure it will be,’ said Mrs. Thornton bravely: ‘much more than if I come too!—You’ll have to look after the Liddlies just as if you were a real grown-up!’

‘But I don’t want any more adventures!’ sobbed Emily: ‘I’vegotanEarthquake!’

Passions were running far too high for any one to be aware how the final separation took place. The next thing Mrs. Thornton could remember was how tired her arm had been, after waving and waving at that dwindling speck which bore away on the land breeze, hung awhile stationary in the intervening calm, then won the Trade and climbed up into the blue.

Meanwhile, at the rail stood Margaret Fernandez,who, with her little brother Harry, was going to England by the same boat. No one had come to see them off: and the brown nurse who was accompanying them had gone below the moment she came on board, so as to be ill as quickly as possible. How handsome Mr. Bas-Thornton had looked, with his English distinction! Yet every one knew he had no money. Her set white face was turned towards the land, her chin quivering at intervals. Slowly the harbour disappeared: the disordered profligacy of the turbulent, intricate mass of hills sunk lower in the sky. The occasional white houses, and white puffs of steam and smoke from the sugar-mills, vanished. At last the land, all palely shimmering like the bloom on grapes, settled down into the mirror of emerald and blue.

She wondered whether the Thornton children would prove companionable, or a nuisance. They were all younger than she was: which was a pity.