uskily at last, "if it hadn't been for Peter,
Aunt Dorothy would never have been drowned."

CHAPTER XIX.

THE LAST STRAW.

The words fell like a thunderbolt into the midst of the group.
Eustace moved involuntarily to Peter's side and put a protecting
arm round him, as if he had been struck. The little fellow himself
looked utterly bewildered.

"How can you say such a wicked, wicked thing?" exclaimed Nesta in
astonishment; "just as if it was poor Peter's fault."

"Well, wasn't it?" demanded Herbert bitterly, his face still
hidden. "If Peter hadn't been at the other side of the ship--if
Aunt Dorothy had not had to go away and find him--but you all got
into the boat and went away and left her!"

"Don't!" exclaimed Eustace sharply. "You don't know what a wreck in
the dark is like, or you wouldn't talk like that. There isn't time
to know anything. We didn't know Aunt Dorothy was left."

"I should have known," said Herbert, with all the confidence of
ignorance, "and I would have stayed and drowned with her."

He broke off short, rose abruptly, and stumbled in a queer, blind
way from the room. He could not bear that any one should witness
his grief.

Brenda turned a tear-stained face from the window and stared at
the trio now standing close together.

"He isn't thinking what he is saying," she said chokily; "but we
are so frightfully unhappy about Aunt Dorothy--and this seems to
make it worse--I mean that she might so easily have been saved. Of
course you didn't really know her, so you can't understand. But
ever since our mother died Aunt Dorothy--"

But here Brenda's voice broke utterly, and she, too, hurriedly left
the room.

"Well," exclaimed Nesta, "I think it just horrid of them. I shall
never, never like them now."

Eustace turned a pair of surprised brown eyes upon her.

"Won't you?" he said wonderingly. "Why, I like them better than I
did, ever so much."

"What!" Nesta said, "you like them better for saying a horrid thing
like that? To make out it was Peter's fault! Poor little Peter, who
was so nearly drowned himself!"

"It wasn't that part I was thinking of," said Eustace, "but just
how they loved her. Somehow I never thought of it before. Same way
we love mother, I guess; and I don't know what I should have
thought if mother had been drowned saving some one else's brother."

Nesta stared at him blankly. There were things about Eustace lately
that she did not understand. She knew nothi