"Cynical old thing!" said Caroline Lestrange, looking up from Mrs. Bradley's letter.
"No," said Ferdinand, glancing at their son, Derek, aged seven, who was advancing purposefully to the table with a set of the game called Tiddleywinks. "No, indeed she isn't. If mother says they ought to be put out, she is probably perfectly sincere and perfectly right. They must be the most unhappy little devils on earth, those delinquent kids. You can't really do anything for most of 'em. They're a mess, like Humpty Dumpty when he fell off the wall. She goes on to ask whether we'd care to lend her Derek for a bit. I'm all for it. She needs him, I expect, to get the taste of the others out of her mouth."
His son came up and planted the game on the table. Then he surveyed his parents sternly.
"You can both choose your colour," he said, "and I'll have what's left. There's blue and green and red and yellow and purple and white. I don't use the white. I only use the green and purple and yellow and blue and red. I don't like white. Do you like white, mother?"
"No, thank you, darling," Caroline replied.
"I'm not going to play," said his father, basely. "I've got this letter from Gran and I'd better answer it."
He fled, pursued by the joint maledictions of his wife and son, who, thereafter, forgot him, and settled down to Tiddleywinks until it was Derek's bedtime.
"Would you like to go and stay with Gran at the seaside for a bit?" asked Caroline, when she went in to say good-night. Her son's reply was brief but warm, and so by the middle of the following week all arrangements had been made.
The house which Mrs. Bradley had rented was about a hundred yards from the sea, and was, from the child's point of view, admirably situated. Mrs. Bradley had fitted up her dressing-room for him, and there he had a camp bed and a chest of drawers. On the top of this antiquated but useful piece of furniture he placed the model of a Viking ship made for him by a cousin. This was so much his most cherished possession that it could not be left at home.
The house was that of which Mrs. Bradley had heard from the Warden. Unattractive from the outside, and furnished in accordance with the taste of an earlier period, it was comfortable and convenient enough, and grandmother and grandson enjoyed one another's company and the pleasures of the sea and the shore. Permission had not, so far, been granted for any of the Warden's boys to join them.
George, Mrs. Bradley's chauffeur, one of the servants she had brought with her, had become mentor to the little boy, and introduced him to the wonders of the internal combustion engine and to the vocabulary of the mechanically-minded. The weather, on the whole, was fine, and although Mrs. Bradley deplored the ostrich-outlook of the authorities in refraining from granting their blessing to her holiday scheme for the Home Boys (as they were euphemistically entitled), she enjoyed the sea air, the old-fashioned house, and, until the last week of the child's visit, the innocuous gossip of the village.
During this last week, however, she was surprised and annoyed when the little boy said suddenly, one evening when he was having his supper, and only an hour before his bedtime,
"Gran, what lady was murdered in this house?"
"Murdered?" said Mrs. Bradley. She had no time to prepare an answer. "Oh, I expect they mean poor old Aunt What's-it. I've forgotten her name."
"Does her ghost walk?"
"Why should it?"
"Somebody told me it did."
"Had this person seen it?"
"No. What would it look like, Gran?"
"Exactly like the person, I suppose."
"I don't want to see it, Gran."
"No such luck. I've tried hard to see them, many and many a time. It isn't a scrap of good. I've come to the conclusion there are no such things. People are such liars, unfortunately."
"Do you think Miss Peeple was telling me lies, Gran? She said Miss Bella killed Aunt Flora, and Aunt Flora's spirit can't rest."
"Well, she's a funny old thing, and not very sensible, you know——"
"George says she's batty and sees double. Is it the same thing, Gran?"
"Exactly the same thing," said Mrs. Bradley, paying her usual mental tribute to her chauffeur.
"Yes ... but I think I'm glad I'm sleeping in the next room, Gran. Do you think I could move my bed in beside yours?"