that Gerald rather liked sucking-up to people.

“Little boys don’t understand diplomacy,” said Gerald calmly; “sucking-up is simply silly. But it’s better to be good than pretty and—”

“How do you know?” Jimmy asked.

“And,” his brother went on, “you never know when a grown-up may come in useful. Besides, they like it. You must give them some little pleasures. Think how awful it must be to be old. My hat!”

“I hope I shan’t be an old maid,” said Kathleen.

“I don’t mean to be,” said Mabel briskly. “I’d rather marry a travelling tinker.”

“It would be rather nice,” Kathleen mused, “to marry the Gipsy King and go about in a caravan telling fortunes and hung round with baskets and brooms.”

“Oh, if I could choose,” said Mabel, “of course I’d marry a brigand, and live in his mountain fastnesses, and be kind to his captives and help them to escape and—”

“You’ll be a real treasure to your husband,” said Gerald.

“Yes,” said Kathleen, “or a sailor would be nice. You’d watch for his ship coming home and set the lamp in the dormer window to light him home through the storm; and when he was drowned at sea you’d be most frightfully sorry, and go every day to lay flowers on his daisied grave.”

“Yes,” Mabel hastened to say, “or a soldier, and then you’d go to the wars with short petticoats and a cocked hat and a barrel round your neck like a St. Bernard dog. There’s a picture of a soldier’s wife on a song auntie’s got. It’s called ‘The Veevandyear.’ ”fb

“When I marry—” Kathleen quickly said.

“When I marry,” said Gerald, “I’ll marry a dumb girl, or else get the ring to make her so that she can’t speak unless she’s spoken to. Let’s have a squint.”

He applied his eye to the stone lattice.

“They’re moving off,” he said. “Those pink and purple hats are nodding off in the distant prospect; and the funny little man with the beard like a goat is going a different way from everyone else—the gardeners will have to head him off. I don’t see Mademoiselle, though. The rest of you had better bunk. It doesn’t do to run any risks with picnics. The deserted hero of our tale, alone and unsupported, urged on his brave followers to pursue the commissariat waggons, he himself remaining at the post of danger and difficulty, because he was born to stand on burning decks whence all but he had fled, and to lead forlorn hopes when despaired of by the human race!”

“I think I’ll marry a dumb husband,” said Mabel, “and there shan’t be any heroes in my books when I write them, only a heroine. Come on, Cathy.”

Coming out of that cool, shadowy summer-house into the sunshine was like stepping into an oven, and the stone of the terrace was burning to the children’s feet.

“I know now what a cat on hot bricks feels like,” said Jimmy.

The antediluvian animals are set in a beech-wood on a slope at least half a mile across the park from the castle. The grandfather of the present Lord Yalding had them set there in the middle of last century, in the great days of the late Prince Consort,fc the Exhibition of 1851, Sir Joseph Paxton,fd and the Crystal Palace. Their stone flanks, their wide, ungainly wings, their lozenged crocodile-like backs show grey through the trees a long way off.

Most people think that noon is the hottest time of the day. They are wrong. A cloudless sky gets hotter and hotter all the afternoon, and reaches its very hottest at five. I am sure you must all have noticed this when you are going out to tea anywhere in your best clothes, especially if your clothes are starched and you happen to have a rather long and shadeless walk.

Kathleen, Mabel, and Jimmy got hotter and hotter, and went more and more slowly. They had almost reached that stage of resentment and discomfort when one “wishes one hadn’t come” before they saw, below the edge of the beech-wood, the white waved handkerchief of the bailiff.

That banner, eloquent of tea, shade, and being able to sit down, put new heart into them. They mended their pace, and a final desperate run landed them among the drifted coppery leaves and bare grey and green roots of the beech-wood.

“Oh, glory!” said Jimmy, throwing himself down. “How do you do?”

The bailiff looked very nice, the girls thought. He was not wearing his velveteens, but a grey flannel suit that an Earl need not