as to think any _real_ person was dead. She might have known all
the servants would have been howling on the doorstep _then_!"

The tone in which she made this remarkable statement was too much for
Anstice's gravity; and he gave way to a fit of unrestrained laughter
which mightily offended his small friend.

"I don't see anything to laugh at," she observed icily. "Seems to me
people being dead ought to make you cry 'stead of laugh."

"Quite so, Cherry," returned Anstice, wiping his eyes ostentatiously.
"But you see in this case there wasn't anybody dead--at least, so I
understood from Mrs. Carstairs."

"Yes, there was, then," returned Cherry, still unforgiving. "I'd gone
and killed my best-b'loved Lady Daimler"--christened from her mother's
car--"on purpose to make a pretty death-bed for Tochatti--and then she
simply flew into a temper--oh, a most _dreadful_ temper, my dear!" At
the thought of Tochatti's anger she forgave Anstice's lesser offence,
and took him once more into her favour.

"That was too bad, especially as I'm sure Tochatti doesn't, often lose
her temper with you," said Anstice with some guile; and Cherry looked at
him gravely, without speaking.

"Not with me," she announced presently. "But Tochatti gets awful cross
sometimes. She used to be fearful angry with Nurse Marg'ret. Where's
Nurse Marg'ret now, my dear?"

"Don't know, Cherry. I suppose she is nursing someone else by this time.
Why do you want to know?"

"'Cos I like Nurse Marg'ret," said Cherry seriously. "Tochatti didn't.
She made a wax dollie of her once, and she only does that when she
doesn't like peoples."

"A wax dollie?" Anstice was honestly puzzled. "My dear child, what do
you mean?"

"She did," said Cherry stoutly. "She maded an image like what they have
in their churches, because I saw her do it--out of a candle, and then
she got a great long pin and stuck it in the gas and runned it into the
little dollie." As Cherry grew excited her speech became slightly
unintelligible. "And I know it was Nurse Marg'ret 'cos she wrote a great
big 'M' on a bit of paper and pinned it on to show who it was meant
for."

Her words made an instant and very unexpected impression on her hearer;
not alone as a revelation of Tochatti's mediaeval fashion of revenging
herself upon an unconscious rival--though this method of revenge was
amazing in the twentieth century--but as a strangely apt confirmation of
those doubts and suspicions which had been