The Trouble-Makers Read Online Free PDF

anyway, and contained more protein, when Katharine heard a very small knock on the front door. Unfortunately, Stella hadn’t heard it, so after one or two vain attempts to interrupt, Katharine simply had to leave the room in the middle of hearing about the vitamin content of skim milk. She hurried across the hall just as the very small knock was being repeated a second—or perhaps even a third—time.
    It was Angela Prescott, in bedroom slippers and with a winter coat pulled on over her pyjamas. She looked white and rather wide-eyed against the background of rainy darkness, and at first she seemed to have some difficulty in explaining her errand.
    “Please—do you think——? That is, do you know where Mummy is?” she asked. “You see, I don’t know what to do. I think something’s happened.”

CHAPTER III
    “C OME IN , A NGELA ,” said Katharine, reaching out to draw the child towards her. “Come into the warm and tell me what’s the matter.”
    But Angela shook her head. Shivering yet obstinate, she would not even come under the shelter of the doorway.
    “No,” she said. “No, I must go back. You see, I think something’s happened. I—I only wondered if you knew where Mummy was?”
    With sudden uneasiness. Katharine remembered her last sight of Mary Prescott that evening—creeping, dawdling, killing time under the street lamp so as not to reach home in time to encounter her husband. She remembered with compunction the gusto with which she had listened to Mary’s account of this latest quarrel with Alan—a quarrel which sounded just like all the others that Mary had related over the years. Or did it? Hadn’t there been something odd, and strained, in Mary’s manner? …
    Certainly Angela must not be allowed to go back alone to whatever was the mysterious trouble next door. Telling the child to wait for a moment, Katharine hurriedly returned to the kitchen, and explained to Stella briefly what had happened, and that she must go back with Angela at once.
    Stella’s face lit up. Other people’s troubles were like nourishment to her—something concentrated and quick-acting out of a jar. She would listen to no argument but that she must come too—“You might need my help,” she explained, with shining eyes.
    So it could not have been more than a minute or two before Katharine, Stella and Angela were all filing in through the Prescotts’ narrow hall, the facsimile of Katharine’s own, andinto their living-room, which was cold and untidy, and looked as if no one had been in it all day.
    Once under her own roof, and in familiar surroundings, Angela became more communicative. Prompted by a good deal of questioning, she managed to give some sort of account of the situation that was troubling her.
    Her mother was out; that was the first thing; had been out all the evening. Not that this was so unusual, but her father was out too, and neither of then had told Angela anything about it, or had left any supper for her, or told her to go to bed at the usual time, or any of the things they usually did. They hadn’t even argued with each other about whether they should go out and leave her, which was apparently a familiar, and therefore comforting, prelude to their outings. “There’s usually such a fuss, you see,” said Angela nostalgically. “About me, and about Mummy not being ready in time, and about the fires being on, or off, and about locking or not locking the back door. I can’t understand how they could have just gone, without any fuss at all.”
    No, she hadn’t seen either of them when she came in from school, though of course her father might have been in his study, she hadn’t looked. Auntie Pen had come to give her and Jane their tea, and No, she didn’t know if Auntie Pen had been asked to come—she hadn’t thought anything about it, and anyway Auntie Pen had seemed in a terrible hurry, she had gone away again while Angela and Jane were still eating. And then they’d been playing in