all, he would clean
them so soon as she went to brush Helen's hair. In a moment what he had
said would be true.

But he was miserable. Hamlet came up from the nether regions where
he had spent the night, showing his teeth, wagging his tail, and even
rolling on the cockatoos. Jeremy paid no attention. The weight in his
heart grew heavier and heavier. He watched, from under his eyelids, the
Jampot. In a moment she must go into Helen's room. But she did not. She
stayed for a little arranging the things on the breakfast-table--then
suddenly, without a word, she turned into Jeremy's bedchamber. His heart
began to hammer. There was an awful pause; he heard from miles away
Mary's voice: "Do do that button, Helen, I can't get it!" and Helen's
"Oh, bother!"

Then, like Judgment, the Jampot appeared again. She stood in the
doorway, looking across at him.

"You 'ave not cleaned your teeth, Master Jeremy," she said. "The glass
isn't touched, nor your toothbrush... You wicked, wicked boy. So it's a
liar you've become, added on to all your other wickedness."

"I forgot," he muttered sullenly. "I thought I had."

She smiled the smile of approaching triumph.

"No, you did not," she said. "You knew you'd told a lie. It was in your
face. All of a piece--all of a piece."

The way she said this, like a pirate counting over his captured
treasure, was enraging. Jeremy could feel the wild fury at himself, at
her, at the stupid blunder of the whole business rising to his throat.

"If you think I'm going to let this pass you're making a mighty
mistake," she continued, "which I wouldn't do not if you paid me all the
gold in the kingdom. I mayn't be good enough to keep my place and look
after such as you, but anyways I'm able to stop your lying for another
week or two. I know my duty even though there's them as thinks I don't."

She positively snorted, and the excitement of her own vindication and
the just condemnation of Jeremy was such that her hands trembled.

"I don't care what you do," Jeremy shouted. "You can tell anyone you
like. I don't care what you do. You're a beastly woman."

She turned upon him, her face purple. "That's enough, Master Jeremy,"
she said, her voice low and trembling. "I'm not here to be called names
by such as you. You'll be sorry for this before you're much older....
You see."

There was then an awful and sickly pause. Jeremy seemed to himself to
be sinking lower and lower into a damp clammy depth of de