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In the end Mrs. Marlott said she would keep them for the night. She could make up beds for them on the floor. But first—and she eyed them grimly—they must be made clean. Then, to their intense horror, she set about it.

First she placed a tub in the middle of the scullery floor, and filled it with apparently boiling water. Then she and her maid seized the reluctant Sprays and forcibly plunged them in it, scrubbing their bodies with soap and a very hard brush. Selina and the twins screamed as if they were being murdered, Ruthie fought, and Tamar wept. Susan, pledged to dignity as captain and leader, endured in silence, but felt as if she would die under the ordeal.

Meanwhile their clothes were boiling in the copper, so that they had nothing to put on when they came out of the tub, but were wrapped instead in quilts and coverlets, and set round the room on chairs, looking queer and unnatural to one another.

"I want my Dad!" shouted Elis.

"I want my Dad!" wept Ruth.

Mrs. Marlott was touched by the orphans' cry. She supposed that their father had died quite recently.