years, and Jem is very clever, though he is freckled and wears spectacles.'

'I do not know why you should bother me with a parcel of raw lads,' said Sir Richard.

'I shall amuse them,' replied Thomasina serenely; 'you will only have to take Polly in to dinner, and remember that I shall be really vexed if you are not kind to her.'

'I am sure that I am always civil enough,' rejoined Sir Richard.

'So you are, horribly civil. I want you to make her happy by talking of the children and asking them up here. It is Tom's birthday next week, and you may invite the nursery to drink tea and eat strawberries here in the garden.'

'You can arrange all that sort of thing, Thomasina.'

'That would not please Polly half so much. She will think it so nice of you to remember Tom's birthday.'

'But I don't remember it,' said Sir Richard

sturdily.

'Then I shall remind you of it just before dinner, and if I find that you have not given the invitation before the second course is on the table, I shall send Giles round with a message.' Sir Richard laughed and resigned himself. He had tyrannised over his family and dependants for a good many years, but he was pliable as wax in the hands of Thomasina.

Owing, perhaps, to these instructions the dinner party was a success. Thomasina did her part prettily, and Sir Richard was so kind and friendly that Robin was disabused of an idea, derived from the younger Windsors, that he had become a malignant ogre since Anthony's second marriage, nourishing a special grudge against his innocent grand

sons.

Mary, indeed, was so overwhelmed by the graciousness of his invitation to the

strawberry fête, that she may have suspected some sinister intention of decoying the children into the larder; yet she was pleased at heart; and Anthony was still more sensible of the honour done to them.

Robin had been knocking about the world too long to be troubled by shyness, and he talked a good deal, and talked agreeably, of the countries he had visited in the course of his long cruise. Thomasina was provoked with Mr. Benson, the clergyman of the parish, for claiming her sympathy and attention to a long account of the misdeeds of a Sunday-school girl when she wished to hear all that Robin had to tell of a ride over the Pampas.

The two young men ventured to leave the dining-room before their elders; and, while Jem pored over the library shelves with the desire which a voracious reader feels to take down a volume, checked by the

fear of making an unsuccessful venture, Robin came up to Thomasina and asked whether it was allowable to go into the garden.

'I should like it very much,' said Thomasina with alacrity. It is a lovely evening. Will you come, Miss Benson?'

But Miss Benson was elderly and wore thin shoes. Mrs. Bertram volunteered to stay with her, and Thomasina, young enough to feel that the duties of à hostess sat lightly upon her, threw up the sash and stepped out with Robin on the broad gravel walk. It was, as she had said, a perfect midsummer evening, with the glow of sunset light still gilding the trees in the park, while the deer, which grazed close to the garden railings, formed a lovely foreground to the landscape. Thomasina pointed with a smile to the great double gates by which she had been used to lie in wait for the school-boys.

'How often I have scared the deer in

scudding across to those gates,' she said, 'and how scared I was myself when Aunt Thomasina caught me, the very last time I

did it.'

The morning when we told you that Polly was ill?'

‘When you would not tell me. If it had not been for Jem's greater frankness, perhaps she would have been Polly Windsor still.'

'I was very angry about the marriage at that time,' said Robin, and now I think that Polly is the happiest woman in the world.'

'Yes,' said Thomasina, in a tone of doubtful assent; but people have different capacities for happiness, and I should like a wider range. She does not think of anything but her chickens and her babies.'

As you

'And her Anthony,' said Robin. begin with the chickens, I presume that it is an ascending scale?'

'Of course I mean that he crowns the