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"Oh?" Anstice looked rather blank "But I don't see----"

"Well, it see, when Tochatti returned froh Mass about noon, she found the blinds pulled down in all the front s of the house!"

"The little ht!"

"She certainly did, andto meet her with her face quite ith tears--you know Cherry is a born actress--and begging her, between sobs, to come upstairs softly as someone was dead!"

"Someone? She did not specify who it was?"

"No--or if she did Tochatti did not understand; but when she got into the nursery she found an elaborately conceived representation of a Catholic death-bed--flowers, bits of candle, and so on; and Cherry's very biggest doll--the one you gave her, by the way, Dr Anstice--enacting the part of the corpse!"

Even Anstice's ainst the humour of the shed heartily

"And Tochatti took it ahter

"Yes It see Cherry in tears she never doubted that soedy had occurred!"

"So you had to punish the poor mite for her realism!"

"Yes Tochatti waited for --and then hauled the culprit before h I really didn't see ed, in order to pacify Tochatti, to sentence her to go to bed early--a special punishment on Sunday, when, as a rule, she sits up quite late!"

"I almost wonder," said Anstice slowly, "that Tochatti, devoted as she is to Cherry, could bring herself to give the child away One would have expected her to hush up any small misdeeds, not dwell upon them to the powers that be"

Chloe looked at him with a hint of cynicism in her eyes

"Even Tochatti is huht one's natural i reassured, is to scold somebody Besides, Tochatti, in her way, is iives what she really considers an injury"

These words, fitting in so curiously with their conversation a little earlier, caused the lance surreptitiously at one another; but Chloe, whose eyes were as sharp as her wits, intercepted the look