LUCILLE.

“If you drinks a drop more, Miss Lucy, you’ll just go like my pore young sister goed,” observed Cook in a warning voice, as Lucille paused to get her second wind for the second draught.

(Lucille had just been tortured at the stake by Sioux and Blackfeet thirsty work on a July afternoon.)

“And how did she go, Cookie-Bird Pop?” inquired Lucille politely, with round eyes, considering over the top of the big lemonade-flagon as it rose again to her determined little mouth.

“No, Miss Lucy,” replied Cook severely. “Pop she did not. She swole ... swole and swole.”

“You mean ‘swelled,’ Cookoo,” corrected Lucille, inclined to be a little didactic and corrective at the age of ten.

“Well, she were my sister after all, Miss Lucy,” retorted Cook, “and perhaps I may, or may not, know what she done. I say she swole and what is more she swole clean into a dropsy. All along of drinking water.... Drops of water Dropsy.”

“Never drink water,” murmured Dam, absentmindedly annexing, and pocketing, an apple.

“Ah, water, but you see this is lemonade,” countered Lucille. “Home-made, too, and not er gusty. It doesn’t make you go ” and here it is regrettable to have to relate that Lucille made a shockingly realistic sound, painfully indicative of the condition of one who has imbibed unwisely and too well of a gas-impregnated liquor.

“No more does water in my experiants,” returned Cook, “and I was not allooding to wulgarity, Miss Lucy, which you should know better than to do such. My pore young sister’s systerm turned watery and they tapped her at the last. All through drinking too much water, which lemonade ain’t so very different either, be it never so ’ome-made.... Tapped ‘er they did like a carksk, an’ ’er a Band of ’Oper, Blue Ribander, an’ Sunday Schooler from birth, an’ not departin’ from it when she grew up. Such be the Ways of Providence,” and Cook sighed with protestive respectfulness....

“Tapped ’er systerm, they did,” she added pensively, and with a little justifiable pride.

“Were they hard taps?” inquired Lucille, reappearing from behind the flagon. “I hate them myself, even on the funny-bone or knuckles but on the cistern! Ugh!”

“Hard taps; they was silver taps,” ejaculated Cook, “and drawed gallings and gallings and nothing to laugh at, Master Dammicles, neether.... So don’t you drink no more, Miss Lucy.”

“I can’t,” admitted Lucille and indeed, to Dam, who regarded his “cousin” with considerable concern, it did seem that, even as Cook’s poor young sister of unhappy memory, Lucille had “swole” though only locally.

“Does beer make you swell or swole or swellow when you swallow, Cooker?” he inquired; “because, if so, you had better be ” but he was not allowed to conclude his deduction, for cook, bridling, bristling, and incensed, bore down upon the children and swept them from her kitchen.

To the boy, even as he fled via a dish of tartlets and cakes, it seemed remarkable that a certain uncertainty of temper (and figure) should invariably distinguish those who devote their lives to the obviously charming and attractive pursuit of the culinary art.

Surely one who, by reason of unfortunate limitations of sex, age, ability, or property, could not become a Colonel of Cavalry could still find infinite compensation in the career of cook or railway-servant.

Imagine, in the one case, having absolute freedom of action with regard to raisins, tarts, cream, candy-peel, jam, plum-puddings and cakes, making life one vast hamper, and in the other case, boundless opportunity in the matter of leaping on and off moving trains, carrying lighted bull’s-eye lanterns, and waving flags.

One of the early lessons that life taught him, without troubling to explain them, and she taught him many and cruel, was that Cooks are Cross.

“What shall we do now, Dam?” asked Lucille, and added, “Let’s raid the rotten nursery and rag the Haddock. Little ass! Nothing else to do. How I hate Sunday afternoon.... No work and no play. Rotten.”

The Haddock, it may be stated, owed his fishy title to the fact that he once possessed a Wealthy Relative of the name of Haddon. With far-sighted reversionary intent his mother, a Mrs. Berners nee Seymour Stukeley, had christened him Haddon.

But the Wealthy Relative, on being informed of his good fortune, had bluntly replied that he intended to leave his little all to the founding of Night-Schools for illiterate Members of Parliament, Travelling-Scholarships for uneducated Cabinet Ministers, and Deportment Classes for New Radical Peers. He was a Funny Man as well as a Wealthy Relative.

And, thereafter, Haddon Berners’ parents had, as Cook put it, “up and died” and “Grandfather” had sent for, and adopted, the orphan Haddock.

Though known to Dam and Lucille as “The Haddock” he was in reality an utter Rabbit and esteemed as such. A Rabbit he was born, a Rabbit he lived, and a Rabbit he died. Respectable ever. Seen in the Right Place, in the Right Clothes, doing the Right Thing with the Right People at the Right Time.

Lucille was the daughter of Sylvester Bethune Gavestone, the late and lamented Bishop of Minsterbury (once a cavalry subaltern), a school, Sandhurst, and life-long friend of “Grandfather,” and husband of “Grandfather’s” cousin, Geraldine Seymour Stukeley.

Poor “Grandfather,” known to the children as “Grumper,” the ferocious old tyrant who loved all mankind and hated all men, with him adoption was a habit, and the inviting of other children to stay as long as they liked with the adopted children, a craze.

And yet he rarely saw the children, never played with them, and hated to be disturbed.

He had out-lived his soldier-contemporaries, his children, his power to ride to hounds, his pretty taste in wine, his fencing, dancing, flirting, and all that had made life bearable everything, as he said, but his gout and his liver (and, it may be added, except his ferocious, brutal temper).

“Yes.... Let us circumvent, decoy, and utterly destroy the common Haddock,” agreed Dam.

The entry into the nursery was an effective night-attack by Blackfeet (not to mention hands) but was spoilt by the presence of Miss Smellie who was sitting there knitting relentlessly.

“Never burst into rooms, children,” she said coldly. “One expects little of a boy, but a girl should try to appear a Young Lady. Come and sit by me, Lucille. What did you come in for or rather for what did you burst in?”

“We came to play with the Haddock,” volunteered Dam.

“Very kind and thoughtful of you, I am sure,” commented Miss Smellie sourly. “Most obliging and benevolent,” and, with a sudden change to righteous anger and bitterness, “Why don’t you speak the truth?”

“I am speaking the truth, Miss er Smellie,” replied the boy. “We did come to play with the dear little Haddock like one plays with a football or a frog. I didn’t say we came for Haddock’s good.”

“We needed the Haddock, you see, Miss Smellie,” confirmed Lucille.

“How many times am I to remind you that Haddon Berners’ name is Haddon, Lucille,” inquired Miss Smellie. “Why must you always prefer vulgarity? One expects vulgarity from a boy but a girl should try to appear a Young Lady.”

With an eye on Dam, Lucille protruded a very red tongue at surprising length, turned one eye far inward toward her nose, wrinkled that member incredibly, corrugated her forehead grievously, and elongated her mouth disastrously. The resultant expression of countenance admirably expressed the general juvenile view of Miss Smellie and all her works.

Spurred to honourable emulation, the boy strove to excel. Using both hands for the elongation of his eyes, the extension of his mouth, and the depression of his ears, he turned upon the Haddock so horrible a mask that the stricken child burst into a howl, if not into actual tears.

“What’s the matter, Haddon?” demanded Miss Smellie, looking up with quick suspicion.

“Dam made a fathe at me,” whimpered the smitten one.

“Say ‘made a grimace’ not ‘made a face,’” corrected Miss Smellie. “Only God can make faces.”

Dam exploded.

“At what are you laughing, Damocles?” she asked sternly.

“Nothing, Miss Smellie. What you said sounded rather funny and a little irrevilent or is it irrembrant?”

“Damocles! Should I be likely to say anything Irreverent? Should I ever dream of Irreverence? What can you mean? And never let me see you make faces again.”

“I didn’t let you see me, Miss Smellie, and only God can make faces ”

“Leave the room at once, Sir, I shall report your impudence to your great-uncle,” hissed Miss Smellie, rising in wrath and the bad abandoned boy had attained his object. Detention in the nursery for a Sunday afternoon was no part of his programme.

Most unobtrusively Lucille faded away also.

“Isn’t she a hopeless beast,” murmured she as the door closed.

“Utter rotter,” admitted the boy. “Let’s slope out into the garden and dig some worms for bait.”

“Yes,” agreed Lucille, and added, “Parse Smellie,” whereupon, with one voice and heart and purpose the twain broke into a pæan, not of praise a kind of tribal lay, and chanted:

“Smellie Very common noun, absurd person, singular back number, tutor gender, objectionable case governed by the word I,” and so da capo.

And yet the poor lady strove to do her duty in that station of life in which it had pleased Providence (or a drunken father) to place her and to make the children “genteel”. Had she striven to win their love instead, her ministrations might have had some effect (other than infinite irritation and bitter dislike).

She was the Compleat Governess, on paper, and all that a person entrusted with the training of young children should not be, in reality. She had innumerable and admirable testimonials from various employers of what she termed “aristocratic standing”; endless certificates that testified unto her successful struggles in Music, Drawing, Needlework, German, French, Calisthenics, Caligraphy, and other mysteries, including the more decorous Sciences (against Physiology, Anatomy, Zoology, Biology, and Hygiene she set her face as subjects apt to be, at times, improper), and an appearance and manner themselves irrefragible proofs of the highest moral virtue.

She also had the warm and unanimous witness of the children at Monksmead that she was a Beast.

To those who frankly realize with open eyes that the student of life must occasionally encounter indelicacies upon the pleasant path of research, it may be revealed, in confidence, that they alluded to Miss Smellie as “Sniffy” when not, under extreme provocation, as “Stinker”.

She taught them many things and, prominently, Deceit, Hate, and an utter dislike of her God and her Religion a most disastrous pair.

Poor old “Grumper”; advertising, he got her, paid her highly, and gave her almost absolute control of the minds, souls, and bodies of his young wards and “grandchildren”.

“The best of everything” for them and they, at the average age of eight, a band of depressed, resentful babes, had “hanged, drawed, and quartered” her in effigy, within a month of coming beneath her stony ministrations.

In appearance Miss Smellie was tall, thin, and flat. Most exceedingly and incredibly flat. Impossibly flat. Her figure, teeth, voice, hair, manner, hats, clothes, and whole life and conduct were flat as Euclid’s plane-surface or yesterday’s champagne.

To counter-balance the possession, perhaps, of so many virtues, gifts, testimonials, and certificates she had no chin, no eyebrows, and no eyelashes. Her eyes were weak and watery; her spectacles strong and thick; her nose indeterminate, wavering, erratic; her ears large, her teeth irregular and protrusive, her mouth unfortunate and not guaranteed to close.

An ugly female face is said to be the index and expression of an ugly mind. It certainly was so in the case of Miss Smellie. Not that she had an evil or vicious mind in any way far from it, for she was a narrowly pious and dully conscientious woman. Her mind was ugly as a useful building may be very ugly or as a room devoid of beautiful furniture or over-crowded with cheap furniture may be ugly.

And her mind was devoid of beautiful thought-furniture, and over-crowded with cheap and ugly furniture of text-book facts. She was an utterly loveless woman, living unloving, and unloved a terrible condition.

One could not like her.

Deadly dull, narrow, pedantic, petty, uninspiring, Miss Smellie’s ideals, standards, and aims were incredibly low.

She lived, and taught others to live, for appearances.

The children were so to behave that they might appear “genteel”. If they were to do this or that, no one would think they were young ladies or young gentlemen.

“If we were out at tea and you did that, I should be ashamed,” she would cry when some healthy little human licked its jarnmy fingers, and “Do you wish to be considered vulgar or a little gentleman, Damocles?”

Damocles was profoundly indifferent on the point and said so plainly.

They were not to be clean of hand for hygienic reasons but for fear of what people might “think”; they were not to be honourable, gentle, brave and truthful because these things are fine but because of what the World might dole out in reward; they were not to eat slowly and masticate well for their health’s sake but by reason of “good manners”; they were not to study that they might develop their powers of reasoning, store their minds, and enlarge their horizons but that they might pass some infernal examination or other, ad majorem Smelliae gloriam; they were not to practise the musical art that they might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace, delight, and self-expression but that they might “play their piece” to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride, expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other reason than that it was the recommended way to Eternal Bliss and a Good Time Hereafter the whole duty of canny and respectable man being to “save his soul” therefore.

Her charges were skilfully, if unintentionally, trained in hypocrisy and mean motive, to look for low reward and strive for paltry ends to do what looked well, say what sounded well, to be false, veneered, ungenuine.

And Miss Smellie was giving them the commonly accepted “education” of their class and kind.

The prize product of the Smellie system was the Haddock whose whole life was a pose, a lie, a refusal to see the actual. Perhaps she influenced him more strongly than the others because he was caught younger and was of weaker fibre. Anyhow he grew up the perfect and heartless snob, and by the time he left Oxford, he would sooner have been seen in a Black Maria with Lord Snooker than in a heavenly chariot with a prophet of unmodish garment and vulgar ancestry.

To the finished Haddock, a tie was more than a character, and the cut of a coat more than the cutting of a loving heart.

To him a “gentleman” was a person who had the current accent and waistcoat, a competence, the entree here and there a goer unto the correct places with the correct people. Manners infinitely more than conduct; externals everything; let the whitening be white and the sepulchre mattered not.

The Haddock had no bloodful vice, but he was unstable as water and could not excel, a moral coward and weakling, a liar, a borrower of what he never intended to return, undeniably and incurably mean, the complete parasite.

From the first he feared and blindly obeyed Miss Smellie, propitiated while loathing her; accepted her statements, standards, and beliefs; curried favour and became her spy and informer.

“What’s about the record cricket-ball throw, Dam?” inquired Lucille, as they strolled down the path to the orchard and kitchen-garden, hot-houses, stream and stables, to seek the coy, reluctant worm.

“Dunno,” replied the boy, “but a hundred yards wants a lot of doing.”

“Wonder if I could do it,” mused Lucille, picking up a tempting egg-shaped pebble, nearly as big as her fist, and throwing it with remarkably neat action (for a girl) at the first pear-tree over the bridge that spanned the trout-stream.

At, but not into.

With that extraordinary magnetic attraction which glass has for the missile of the juvenile thrower, the orchid-house, on the opposite side of the path from the pear-tree, drew the errant stone to its hospitable shelter.

Through the biggest pane of glass it crashed, neatly decapitated a rare, choice exotic, the pride of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, released from its hold a hanging basket, struck a large pot (perched high in a state of unstable equilibrium), and passed out on the other side with something accomplished, something done, to earn a long repose.

So much for the stone.

The descending pot lit upon the edge of one side of the big glass aquarium, smashed it, and continued its career, precipitating an avalanche of lesser pots and their priceless contents.

The hanging basket, now an unhung and travelling basket, heavy, iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, and dour, irascible child and woman hater.

“Bull’s-eye!” commented Dam always terse when not composing fairy-tales.

“Crikey!” shrieked Lucille. “That’s done it,” and fled straightway to her room and violent earnest prayer, not for forgiveness but for salvation, from consequences. (What’s the good of Saying your Prayers if you can’t look for Help in Time of Trouble such as this?)

The face of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith was not pleasant to see as he pranced forth from the orchid-house, brandishing an implement of his trade.

“Ye’ll be needing a wash the day, Mon Sandy, and the Sawbath but fower days syne,” opined Dam, critically observing the moss-and-mud streaked head, face and neck of the raving, incoherent victim of Lucille’s effort.

When at all lucid and comprehensible Mr. MacIlwraith was understood to say he’d give his place (and he twanty-twa years in it) to have the personal trouncing of Dam, that Limb, that Deevil, that predestined and fore-doomed Child of Sin, that

Dam pocketed his hands and said but:

“Havers, Mon Sandy!”

“I’ll tak’ the hide fra y’r bones yet, ye feckless, impident ”

Dam shook a disapproving head and said but:

“Clavers, Mon Sandy!”

“I’ll see ye skelped onny-how or lose ma job, ye ”

More in sorrow than in anger Dam sighed and said but:

“Hoots, Mon Sandy!”

“I’ll go straight to y’r Grandfer the noo, and if ye’r not flayed alive! Aye! I’ll gang the noo to Himself ”

“Wi’ fower an twanty men, an’ five an’ thairrty pipers,” suggested Dam in tuneful song.

Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith did what he rarely did swore violently.

“Do you think at your age it is right?” quoted the wicked boy ... the exceedingly bad and reprehensible boy.

The maddened gardener turned and strode to the house with all his imperfections on his head and face and neck.

Taking no denial from Butterson, he forced his way into the presence of his master and clamoured for instant retributive justice or the acceptance of his resignation forthwith, and him twanty-twa years in the ane place.

“Grandfather,” roused from slumber, gouty, liverish, ferociously angry, sent for Dam, Sergeant Havlan, and Sergeant Havlan’s cane.

“What’s the meaning of this, Sir,” he roared as Dam, cool, smiling, friendly ever, entered the Sanctum. “What the Devil d’ye mean by it, eh? Wreckin’ my orchid-houses, assaultin’ my servants, waking me up, annoying ME! Seven days C.B. and bread and water, on each count. What d’ye mean by it, ye young hound? Eh? Answer me before I have ye flogged to death to teach ye better manners! Guilty or Not Guilty? and I’ll take your word for it.”

“The missile, describing a parabola, struck its subjective with fearful impact, Sir,” replied the bad boy imperturbably, misquoting from his latest fiction (and calling it a “parry-bowler,” to “Grandfather’s” considerable and very natural mystification).

“What?” roared that gentleman, sitting bolt upright in astonishment and wrath.

“No. It’s objective,” corrected Dam. “Yes. With fearful impact. Fearful also were the words of the Mon Sandy.”

“Grandfather” flushed and smiled a little wryly.

“You’d favour me with pleasantries too, would you? I’ll reciprocate to the best of my poor ability,” he remarked silkily, and his mouth set in the unpleasant Stukeley grimness, while a little muscular pulse beat beneath his cheek-bone.

“A dozen of the very best, if you please, Sergeant,” he added, turning to Sergeant Havlan.

“Coat off, Sir,” remarked that worthy, nothing loath, to the boy who could touch him almost as he would with the foil.

Dam removed his Eton jacket, folded his arms, turned his back to the smiter and assumed a scientific arrangement of the shoulders with tense muscles and coyly withdrawn bones. He had been there before....

The dozen were indeed of the Sergeant’s best and he was a master. The boy turned not a hair, though he turned a little pale.... His mouth grew extraordinarily like that of his grandfather and a little muscular pulse beat beneath his cheek-bone.

“And what do you think of my pleasantries, my young friend?” inquired Grandfather. “Feeling at all witty now?”

“Havlan is failing a bit, Sir,” was the cool reply. “I have noticed it at fencing too Getting old or beer perhaps. I scarcely felt him and so did not see or feel the point of your joke.”

“Grandfather’s” flush deepened and his smile broadened crookedly. “Try and do yourself justice, Havlan,” he said. “’Nother dozen. ’Tother way.”

Sergeant Havlan changed sides and endeavoured to surpass himself. It was a remarkably sound dozen.

He mopped his brow.

The bad boy did not move, gave no sign, but retained his rigid, slightly hunched attitude, as though he had not counted the second dozen and expected another stroke.

“Let that be a lesson to you to curb your damned tongue,” said “Grandfather,” his anger evaporating, his pride in the stiff-necked, defiant young rogue increasing.

The boy changed not the rigid, slightly hunched attitude.

“Be pleased to wreck no more of my orchid-houses and to exercise your great wit on your equals and juniors,” he added.

Dam budged not an inch and relaxed not a muscle.

“You may go,” said “Grandfather".... “Well what are you waiting for?”

“I was waiting for Sergeant Havlan to begin,” was the reply. “I thought I was to have a second dozen.”

With blazing eyes, bristling moustache, swollen veins and bared teeth, “Grandfather” rose from his chair. Resting on one stick he struck and struck and struck at the boy with the other, passion feeding on its own passionate acts, and growing to madness until, as the head gardener and Sergeant rushed forward to intervene, Dam fell to the ground, stunned by an unintentional blow on the head.

“Grandfather” stood trembling.... “Quite a Stukeley,” observed he. “Oblige me by flinging his carcase down the stairs.”

“‘Angry Stookly’s mad Stookly’ is about right, mate, wot?” observed the Sergeant to the gardener, quoting an ancient local saying, as they carried Dam to his room after dispatching a groom for Dr. Jones of Monksmead.

“Dammy Darling,” whispered a broken and tear-stained voice outside Dam’s locked and keyless door the next morning, “are you dead yet?”

“Nit,” was the prompt reply, “but I’m starving to death, fast.”

“I am so glad,” was the sobbed answer, “for I’ve got some flat food to push under the door.”

“Shove it under,” said Dam. “Good little beast!”

“I didn’t know anything about the fearful fracass until tea-time,” continued Lucille, “and then I went straight to Grumper and confessed, and he sent me to bed on an empty stummick and I laid upon it, the bed I mean, and howled all night, or part of it anyhow. I howled for your sake, not for the empty stummick. I thought my howls would break or at least soften his hard heart, but I don’t think he heard them. I’m sure he didn’t, in fact, or I should not have been allowed to howl so loud and long.... Did he blame you with anger as well as injustice?”

“With a stick,” was the reply. “What about that grub?”

“I told him you were an innocent unborn babe and that Justice had had a mis-carriage, but he only grinned and said you had got C.B. and dry bread for insilence in the Orderly Room. What is ’insilence’?”

“Pulling Havlan’s leg, I s’pose,” opined Dam. “What about that grub? There comes a time when you are too hungry to eat and then you die. I ”

“Here it is,” squealed Lucille, “don’t go and die after all my trouble. I’ve got some thin ice-wafer biscuits, sulphur tablets, thin cheese, a slit-up apple and three sardines. They’ll all come under the door though the sardines may get a bit out of shape. I’ll come after lessons and suck some brandy-balls here and breathe through the key-hole to comfort you. I could blow them through the key-hole when they are small too.”

“Thanks,” acknowledged Dam gratefully, “and if you could tie some up and a sausage and a tart or two and some bread-and-jam and some chicken and cake and toffee and things in a handkerchief, and climb on to the porch with Grumper’s longest fishing-rod, you might be able to relieve the besieged garrison a lot. If the silly Haddock were any good he could fire sweets up with a catapult.”

“I’d try that too,” announced Lucille, “but I’d break the windows. I feel I shall never have the heart to throw a stone or anything again. My heart is broken,” and the penitent sinner groaned in deep travail of soul.

“Have you eaten everything, Darling? How do you feel?” she suddenly asked.

“Yes. Hungrier than ever,” was the reply. “I like sulphur tablets with sardines. Wonder when they’ll bring that beastly dry bread?”

“If there’s a sulphur tablet left I could eat one myself,” said Lucille. “They are good for the inside and I have wept mine sore.”

“Too late,” answered Dam. “Pinch some more.”

“They were the last,” was the sad rejoinder. “They were for Rover’s coat, I think. Perhaps they will make your coat hairy, Dam. I mean your skin.”

“Whiskers to-morrow,” said Dam.

After a pregnant silence the young lady announced:

“Wish I could hug and kiss you, Darling. Don’t you?... I’ll write a kiss on a piece of paper and push it under the door to you. Better than spitting it through the key-hole.”

“Put it on a piece of ham, more sense,” answered Dam.

The quarter-inch rasher that, later, made its difficult entry, pulled fore and pushed aft, was probably the only one in the whole history of Ham that was the medium of a kiss located and indicated by means of a copying-ink pencil and a little saliva.

Before being sent away to school at Wellingborough Dam had a very curious illness, one which greatly puzzled Dr. Jones of Monksmead village, annoyed Miss Smellie, offended Grumper, and worried Lucille.

Sitting in solitary grandeur at his lunch one Sabbath, sipping his old Chambertin, Grumper was vexed and scandalized by a series of blood-curdling shrieks from the floor above his breakfast-room. Butterson, dispatched in haste to see “who the Devil was being killed in that noisy fashion,” returned to state deferentially as how Master Damocles was in a sort of heppipletic fit, and foaming at the mouth. They had found him in the General’s study where he had been reading a book, apparently; a big Natural History book.

A groom was galloping for Dr. Jones and Mrs. Pont was doin’ her possible.

No. Nothing appeared to have hurt or frightened the young gentleman but he was distinctly ’eard to shout: “It is under my foot. It is moving moving moving out....” before he became unconscious.

No, Sir. Absolutely nothing under the young gentleman’s foot.

Dr. Jones could shed no light and General Sir Gerald Seymour Stukeley hoped to God that the boy was not going to grow up a wretched epileptic. Miss Smellie appeared to think the seizure a judgment upon an impudent and deceitful boy who stole into his elders’ rooms in their absence and looked at their books.

Lucille was troubled in soul for, to her, Damocles confessed the ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward. He said that he had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him. He lived in subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence nay even in that of its counterfeit presentment he was a gibbering, lunatic coward. Such, at least, was her dimly realized conception resultant upon the boy’s bald, stammering confession.

But how could her dear Dammy be a coward the vilest thing on earth! He who was willing to fight anyone, ride anything, go anywhere, act anyhow. Dammy the boxer, fencer, rider, swimmer. Absurd! Think of the day “the Cads” had tried to steal their boat from them when they were sailing it on the pond at Revelmead. There had been five of them, two big and three medium. Dam had closed the eye of one of them, cut the lip of another, and knocked one of the smaller three weeping into the dust.

They had soon cleared off and flung stones until Dam had started running for them and then they had fled altogether.

Think of the time when she set fire to the curtains. Why, he feared no bull, no dog, no tramp in England.

A coward! Piffle.

And yet he had screamed and kicked and cried yes cried as he had shouted that it was under his foot and moving out. Rum! Very rum!

On the day that Dam left Monksmead for school Lucille wept till she could weep no more. Life for the next few years was one of intermittent streaks of delirious joy and gloomy grief, vacation time when he was at Monksmead and term time when he was at school. All the rest of the world weighed as a grain of dust against her hero, Dam.