“Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?”

“I expect I jolly well should, if I really saw one.”

“Being afraid of ghosts doesn’t count, does it?”

“No, of course it doesn’t.  You aren’t afraid as long as I’m here, are you?”

“No.”

“I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep.”

Night after night he heard her calling to him, “Nicky, I’m frightened.”  Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that floor before midnight.  Night after night he got up and came to her and stayed beside her till she went to sleep.

Once he said, “If it was Michael he could tell you stories.”

“I don’t want Michael.  I want you.”

In the day-time she went about looking for him.  “Where’s Nicky?” she said.  “I want him.”

“Nicky’s in the schoolroom.  You can’t have him.”

“But—­I want him.”

“Can’t be helped.  You must do without him.”

“Will he be very long?”

“Yes, ever so long.  Run away like a good little girl and play with Don-Don.”

She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she was a little girl.  If only she could grow big quick and be the same age as Nicky.

Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went away by herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.

The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of the kitchen garden.  The apple-tree had had no apples on it for years.  It was so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched out two great boughs like twisted arms, and was propped up by a wooden post under each armpit.  The breast of its trunk rested on a cross-beam.  The posts and the cross-beam were the doorway of the house, and the branches were its roof and walls.  Anthony had given it to Veronica to live in, and Veronica had given it to Nicky.  It was Nicky’s and Ronny’s house.  The others were only visitors who were not expected to stay.  There was room enough for them both to stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the middle, and to lie flat at the far end.

“What more,” said Nicky, “do you want?”

He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he played with Bonny in the apple-tree house.

“I don’t care a ram if they do,” he said.  But nobody ever did, not even Mr. Parsons.

Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and Bonny sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled unwillingly.  But her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all.  Nicky wondered why.

“Is it,” said Dorothy one morning, “that Ronny doesn’t look as if she was Uncle Bartie’s daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as if he wasn’t Ronny’s father?”

However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she brought it out as if it had been the result of long and mature consideration.

“Or is it,” said Vera, “that I don’t look as if I were Ronny’s mother?”