Chapter 10It was seven o’clock next morning when Jimmy Heard ran up to the front door of the Vicarage and beat upon it with all his might. He was twelve years old and a widow’s son, so he helped by doing a paper round, and that meant bicycling into Embank for the papers which came in on the seven-twenty. His father had been cow-man on one of Lord Burlingham’s farms, and the family had been allowed to stay on in a rather tumbledown cottage up the track on the far side of the stream. He beat on the Vicarage door, and when Mrs. Ball opened it in a dressing-gown he was choking and sobbing.
“Oh, Mrs. Ball, ma’am, he’s dead! He’s drownded! He’s there in the water, and I can’t move him! Oh, ma’am!”
She put a kind arm about the shaking shoulders. He was too thin—of course growing boys—there was
