the three
conspirators began to reach his non-sensitive brain. A quick glance at
Mr. Batholommey and a second at the rector's wife confirmed his vague
feeling that something was wrong. He turned back to Willem, in time to
intercept a blighting scowl of warning the doctor was trying to flash to
the boy.

"Willem," asked Grimm gently, "how did you happen to say such a queer
thing just now? What made you think I'm going to die?"

A concerted and unintelligible interruption from the trio was voiced too
late to prevent Willem's reply.

"_He_ said so," replied the boy, pointing at McPherson.

Then he caught the doctor's annihilating frown. And, simultaneously the
rector cried in stern admonition:

"Willem!"

Mrs. Batholommey, too, was making quite awful and wholly
incomprehensible faces at him. Under the triple menace the boy wilted.
Like every child, since Cain, he had a thousand times been reproved for
things he had said or done in perfect innocence. In fact, the more
unconscious the offence, the more dire was the reproof. Children do not
reason in such matters. It is enough for them to know they have said or
done the wrong thing; without stopping to discover why or how that thing
chanced to be wrong.

The non-linguist traveller in a foreign land cannot read the "Keep off
the Grass" or "No Thoroughfare" signs. But the policeman's threatening
club has a universal language that he understands and intuitively obeys.
So Willem (ignorant of death save as an empty name that vaguely carried
a note of sorrow, and wholly unaware why he should not have imparted the
news of Grimm's coming demise), saw he had said something very terrible.
And a look of abject panic came into his face.

But Grimm's hand was still on his head,--gentle, caressing, infinitely
tender in its touch.

"No, don't stop the boy," commanded Peter, meeting the variously
anguished glances of the others with a half smile that began and ended
in the suddenly widened eyes. "Don't stop him. Only children speak the
truth nowadays. It used to be 'children and fools.' But fools have
learned to tell fool-lies, and they have left children the monopoly of
truth telling. Go on, Willem. You heard the doctor say that I am going
to----?"

Willem's fragile little body was trembling from head to foot. Under Mrs.
Batholommey's distorted glare and threatening noiseless mouthings his
puny courage had gone to pieces. Big tears began to roll down his
cheeks. And noting th