Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/142

132 on the floor and would not waken; that he was dead—she remembered how the old nurse, who had taken care of her since she came from India, had rushed to the next house at the child's cries, to be met by a smiling man-servant, who whispered something to her, and she had gone back clicking her tongue against her palate, as she did when Angela was naughty. Angela remembered how she and the little boy, being told to run away and play, sat beneath a bush watching the house afraid to move till the mystery was cleared up. How she imagined the man-servant must have killed the boy's father; how the boy paled when she told him so, yet showed the glimmer of an excitement at the possession of a tragedy. How cruel they thought those grown-up people, whose world was so much calmer than their own. How amazed they were, and even disappointed, to see, after a couple of hours, the boy's father walk out of the house—a little unsteady, perhaps—with a flushed face and a dim eye. Not till she was grown up did she know that there was a tragedy, after all.

When she had dressed and breakfasted, she