family; but that his worshiped mate was
wild with joy to see him again.

"Look!" said the Master. "The old chap has forgiven her for every bit
of her rottenness to him. He's insanely happy, just because she chooses
to make much of him, once more."

"Yes," assented the Mistress, cryptically "Sometimes dogs are
pitifully--human!"

CHAPTER VI. The Tracker

The child's parents were going to Europe for three months, that winter.
The child himself was getting over a nervous ailment. The doctors had
advised he be kept out of school for a term; and be sent to the country.

His mother was afraid the constant travel from place to place, in
Europe, might be too much for him. So she asked leave of the Mistress
and the Master,--one of whom was her distant relative,--for the
convalescent to stay at the Place during his parents' absence.

That was how it all started.

The youngster was eleven years old; lank and gangling, and blest with a
fretful voice and with far less discipline and manners than a
three-month collie pup. His name was Cyril. Briefly, he was a pest,--an
unspeakable pest.

For the first day or two at the Place, the newness of his surroundings
kept Cyril more or less in bounds. Then, as homesickness and novelty
alike wore off, his adventurous soul expanded.

He was very much at home; far more so than were his hosts, and
infinitely more pleased than they with the situation in general. He had
an infinite genius for getting into trouble. Not in the delightfully
normal fashion of the average growing boy; but in furtively crafty ways
that did not belong to healthy childhood.

Day by day, Cyril impressed his odd personality more and more on
everything around him. The atmosphere of sweet peace which had brooded,
like a blessing, over the whole Place, was dispersed.

The cook,--a marvel of culinary skill and of long service, gave tearful
warning, and departed. This when she found the insides of all her
cooking utensils neatly soaped; and the sheaf of home-letters in her
work-box replaced by cigar-coupons.

One of the workmen threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his
room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture
of a goat's head substituted for his dead mother's photograph in the
well-polished little bronze frame on his bureau.

And so on, all along the line.

The worst and most continuous sufferer from Cyril's loathed presence on
the Place was the massive collie, Lad.

T