cry, but
now that she was so ill, he felt nothing short of a brute.

Jill had slipped into the room and was bending over the excited child.

'Kit doesn't understand--he doesn't know he's not really a beast--he
isn't a beast, is he?' gasped Barbara, between her sobs. 'He's played a
horrible trick on him--he's sent him seven times round the world; and I
never meant him really to walk seven times round the world--you know I
didn't, Jill. It's all my fault for turning him out of my kingdom--if
I hadn't turned him out of my kingdom, he wouldn't be wandering seven
times round----'

'Hush!' whispered Jill, and she gave Christopher a look that sent him
stumbling out of the room in a mixture of bewilderment and remorse. Up
and down the landing he paced, feeling desperately wicked and desperately
foolish by turns, until Jill opened the door of the bedroom and beckoned
to him. She held a thermometer in her hand, and she paid no attention
whatever to the shamefaced inquiry he stammered out.

'Send Miss Finlayson here at once, and say I want the Doctor,' she
commanded, and went hurriedly back into the room.

Clearly, she was very angry with him, and it had never seemed possible
before that Jill could be angry with any one. But it was not this that
suddenly made Kit turn cold and funny all over as he started along the
gallery with Jill's message. He pulled up short with a jerk, and gave a
little cry of dismay.

'What shall I do?' he exclaimed in a despairing tone. 'I've sent the
Doctor fifteen miles in the opposite direction.'

* * * * *

It was nearing seven o'clock and growing dusk when Kit at last struck
the high road between four and five miles below Crofts. It was a full
ten-mile drive by the road from Wootton Beeches, but Kit had saved over
two miles by taking the short cut across the fields. He stopped for the
first time since he had started on his mad chase after the Doctor, and
looked panting up and down the deserted road.

'I can't have been much more than three-quarters of an hour, and I bet
it's four miles,' he muttered. The mud with which he was splashed up
to the collar showed the kind of ground over which he had been travelling,
and the way his breath was coming and going told how much of the four
miles had been covered at a run. Now that he had exhausted his first
impulse to rush after the Doctor and bring him back at any cost, he began
to realise what an absurd