"And I can't help feeling that it was my fault." "What Mary--" began Mrs.Cole.And then she stopped.

She had perhaps some sense that Mary had already received sufficient punishment.
Mary waited, standing against the passage wall.

Jeremy, who had not seen her, vanished into his room.

She waited, then plucking up all her courage with the desperate suffocating sense of a prisoner laying himself beneath the guillotine, she knocked timidly on his door.
He said: "Come in," and entering, she saw him, in his braces, standing on a chair trying to put the picture entitled "Daddy's Christmas" straight upon its nail.

The sight of this familiar task--the picture would never hang straight, although every day Jeremy, who, strangely enough, had an eye to such matters, tried to correct it--cheered her a little.
"Won't it go straight ?" she said feebly.
"No, it won't," he began, and then, suddenly realising the whole position, stopped.
"I'm sorry, Jeremy," she muttered, hanging her head down.
"Oh, that's all right," he answered, turning away from her and pulling at the string.