“Miss Kiligrew,” said little Lord Gawdor, looking up from his slate and the multiplication sum on it that wouldn’t come right.

“Yes, Robert?”

“William, the page-boy, was sent away yesterday for stealing the jam.”

“Go on with your sum,” answered the governess, who was seated at the other end of the table helping Doris, little Lord Gawdor’s sister, to make a map. “This is the third time you have interrupted me with frivolous remarks. How can you expect to make your sum come right if you do not fix your mind on your slate?”

“I will in a minit,” said his lordship; “but I want to tell you, he’d cribbed a pot of plum jam, and he heard some one coming, and he popped it in the copper in the back kitchen where the clothes were boiling. Gran’ma said she never heard of an act of such—what was it, Doris?”

“Turpentine, I think,” replied Doris, throwing back her golden hair from her forehead, relieved to escape for a moment from the monotony of map-making.

“‘Turpitude,’ I suppose you mean,” said Miss Kiligrew.

“Yes, that was it,” said Lord Gawdor. “What’s it mean?”

“Wickedness,” replied Miss Kiligrew. “Go on with your sum.”

“I will; but I want just to tell you, he went away yesterday, and gran’ma said to Mrs Kinsella the cook she didn’t know what she’d do for a page-boy, and cook said she’d try and get Patsy Rooney, the son of the keeper, to come. He’s that red-headed boy we saw carrying the rabbits in the park the other day. My eye!” he concluded with a burst of laughter, “won’t he look funny in buttons!”

“Go on with your sum,” said Miss Kiligrew severely, “and don’t use vulgar expressions before your sister. Who taught you to say that?”

“What?”

“My eye.”

“William, I b’lieve.”

“Well, it is a very good thing he was sent about his business. Go on with your sum.”

Lord Gawdor did as he was bid, and there was silence for a while, broken only by the squeaking of his pencil on the slate and an occasional clicking sound from under the table, where Selina, his youngest sister, aged five, was seated on the floor playing with a box of bricks. They were in the day nursery, which was also the schoolroom, of Glen Druid Park, a great old Irish country house.

Little Lord Gawdor’s mother was dead and his father was in India. He and his sisters were living with their grandmother, Lady Seagrave. It was three weeks before Christmas, and as Lady Seagrave had invited a house-party, the house was in a state of upset owing to the preparations. Downstairs rooms were being cleaned and dusted, carpets taken up and shaken, mirrors polished, and mattresses standing to air before huge fires.

All the fun of a general house-cleaning was going on, and it seemed very hard to Lord Gawdor and Doris that they had to sit all the morning doing sums and making maps instead of helping to increase the confusion down below.

“I’ve done my sum,” said his lordship at last.

“When I have finished demarcating this frontier I will look at it,” said Miss Kiligrew, who had a paint brush in her hand, and was in the act of tinting with red the boundary line between Cochin China and Somewhere-else.

“All right,” said the boy; “don’t hurry, I can wait as long as you like.” He left the chair and, going to the window, he climbed on to the window-seat and looked out at the park. He had scarcely been a minute at the window when he gave a cry.

“Miss Kiligrew—come here, quick!”

The governess and Doris left the table and came to the window.

“That’s him,” said Lord Gawdor, pointing to a small figure trudging across the park.

“Who?” asked the governess.

“Patsy Rooney,” replied he.

“How dare you call me from my work to look at such nonsense!” cried Miss Kiligrew. “Have you no regard for the value of my time?”

“Patsy isn’t nonsense,” replied his lordship. “They say he can trap rabbits better than his father, and he keeps the ferrits and helps to clean the guns, and,” finished up Lord Gawdor, dropping off the window-seat and coming back wearily to the table, “I wish to goodness I was him!”