Jeremy followed her, but his mind was not with her. Was he going to see something? What was it? Who was it?
Then the awful catastrophe that finished the afternoon occurred. Turning the corner of the rock, Charlotte missed her footing and fell straight into a pool. Jeremy, Mary and Helen were upon her almost as she fell. They dragged her out, but alas! what a sight was there! Instead of the beautiful and magnificent Charlotte there was a bedraggled and dirty little girl.
But also, instead of an inanimate and lifeless doll, there was at last a human being, a terrified soul.
The scene that followed passes all power of description. Mrs. Le Page wailed like a lost spirit; Mr. Le Page was so rude to Mr. Cole that it might confidently be said that those two gentlemen would never speak to one another again. Mrs. Cole, dismayed though she was, had some fatalistic consolation that she had known from the first that the picnic would be a most dreadful failure and that the worst had occurred; there was no more to come.
Everyone was too deeply occupied to scold Jeremy. They all moved up to the farm, Charlotte behaving most strangely, even striking her mother and crying: “Let me go! Let me go! I don't want to be clean! I'm frightened! I'm frightened!”
Jeremy hung behind the others. At the bottom of the little lane he stood and waited. Was there a figure coming up through the dusk? Did someone pass him? Why did he suddenly feel no longer afraid, but only reassured and with the strangest certainty that the lane, the beach, the field belonged to him now? He would come there and live when he grew up. He would come often. Had the Scarlet Admiral passed him? If not the Scarlet Admiral, then the other.
The sea picnic had, after all, been not quite a misfortune.
And Charlotte? Charlotte had been woken up, and never would go to sleep again.
Mary Cole had been, all her life, that thing beloved of the sentimental novelist, a misunderstood child. She was the only misunderstood member of the Cole family, and she was misunderstood, as is very often the case, in a large measure because she was so plain. Had she been good-looking as Helen, or independent as Jeremy, she would have either attracted the world in general, or have been indifferent as to whether she attracted it or not. As it was, she longed to attract everyone, and, in truth, attracted nobody. She might have found consolation in books or her own highly-coloured imaginations had it not been for the burning passions which she formed, at a very early age, for living people. For some years now her life had centred round her brother Jeremy. Had the Coles been an observant family they might, perhaps, have found some pathos in the way in which Mary, with her pale sallow complexion, her pear-shaped face with its dull, grey eyes, her enormous glasses, her lanky colourless hair, and her thin, bony figure, gazed at her masculine and independent brother.