“It’s a yarn of Bunty’s,” Pip said contemptuously. “’Tisn’t April the first yet, my son.”

“Come and see,” Bunty returned, swarming up.  Pip followed, and gave a low cry; then Meg and Nell, with rather more difficulty, scrambled up, and the scene was complete.

The delirium had passed, and Judy was lying with wide-open eyes gazing in a tired way at the rafters.

She smiled up at them as they gathered round her.  “If Mahomet won’t come to the mountain,” she said, and then coughed for two or three minutes.

“What have you been doing, Ju, old girl?” Pip said, with an odd tremble in his voice.  The sight of his favourite sister, thin, hollow-checked, exhausted, was too much for his boyish manliness.  A moisture came to his eyes.

“How d’you come, Ju?” he said, blinking it away.

And the girl gave her old bright look up at him.  “Sure and they keep no pony but shank’s at school,” she said; “were you afther thinkin’ I should charter a balloon?”

She coughed again.

Meg dropped down on her knees and put her arms round her little thin sister.

“Judy,” she cried, “oh, Judy, Judy! my dear, my dear!”

Judy laughed for a little time, and called her an old silly, but she soon broke down and sobbed convulsively.  “I’m so hungry,” she said, at last pitifully.

They all four, started up as though they would fetch the stores of Sydney to satisfy her.  Then Meg sat down again and lifted the rough, curly head on her lap.

“You go, Pip,” she said, “and bring wine and a glass, and in the meat-safe there’s some roast chicken; I had it for my lunch, and Martha said she would put the rest there till tea; and be quick, Pip.”

“My word!” said Pip to himself, and he slipped down and flew across to the house.

“UpON my word!” said Martha, meeting him in the hall five minutes later, a cut-glass decanter under his arm, a wineglass held in his teeth by the stem, a dish of cold chicken in his hand, and bread and butter in a little stack beside the chicken.  “Upon my word!  And what next, might I ask?”

“Oh, shut up, and hang your grandmother!” said Pip, brushing past her, and going a circuitous voyage to the shed lest she should be watching.

He knelt down beside his little sister and fed her with morsels of chicken and sips of wine, and stroked her wild hair, and called her old girl fifty times, and besought her to eat just a little more and a little more.

And Judy, catching the look in the brown, wet eyes above her, ate all he offered, though the first mouthful nearly choked her; she would have eaten it had it been elephant’s hide, seeing she loved this boy better than anything else in the world, and he was in such distress.  She was the better for it, too, and sat up and talked quite naturally after a little time.

“You shouldn’t have done t you shouldn’t really, you know, old girl, and what the governor will say to you beats me.”