Anthony went back into the garden to fetch Jane.  He spent an hour looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden.  He looked for Jane in the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the scullery roof, and in the water butt.  It was just possible that on a day of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof into the water-butt.  The least he could do was to find Jane, since Nicky wanted her.

And in the end it turned out that Jane had been captured in her sleep, treacherously, by Auntie Emmy.  And she had escaped, maddened with terror of the large, nervous, incessantly caressing hands.  She had climbed into the highest branch of the tree of Heaven, and crouched there, glaring, unhappy.

“Damn the cat!” said Anthony to himself. (It was not Jane he meant.)

He was distressed, irritated, absurdly upset, because he would have to go back to Nicky without Jane, because he couldn’t get Nicky what he wanted.

In that moment Anthony loved Nicky more than any of them.  He loved him almost more than Frances.  Nicky’s earache ruined the fine day.

He confided in young Vereker.  “I wouldn’t bother,” he said, “if the little chap wasn’t so plucky about it.”

“Quite so, sir,” said young Vereker.

It was young Mr. Vereker who found Jane, who eventually recaptured her.  Young Mr. Vereker made himself glorious by climbing up, at the risk of his neck and in his new white flannels, into the high branches of the tree of Heaven, to bring Jane down.

And when Anthony thanked him he said, “Don’t mention it, sir.  It’s only a trifle,” though it was, as Mr. Norris said, palpable that the flannels were ruined.  Still, if he hadn’t found that confounded cat, they would never, humanly speaking, have had their tennis.

The Aunties did not see Mr. Vereker climbing into the tree of Heaven.  They did not see him playing with Mr. Parsons and Anthony and Mr. Norris.  For as soon as the three young men appeared, and Emmeline and Edith began to be interested and emphatic, Grannie said that as they wouldn’t see anything more of Frances and the children, it was no good staying any longer, and they’d better be getting back.  It was as if she knew that they were going to enjoy themselves and was determined to prevent it.

Frances went with them to the bottom of the lane.  She stood there till the black figures had passed, one by one, through the white posts on to the Heath, till, in the distance, they became small again and harmless and pathetic.

Then she went back to her room where Nicky lay in the big bed.

* * * * *

Nicky lay in the big bed with Jane on one side of him and his steam-engine on the other, and a bag of hot salt against each ear.  Now and then a thin wall of sleep slid between him and his earache.