ameness--"one of those special schools for Roman
Catholics."

"Well, dear, I daresay it won't make very much difference," consoled
Lady Isabel. "I have always heard that Monkshurst was a charming
school, and dear Larry will be _so_ well off--I don't suppose his
religion will interfere in _any_ way. It seldom does, does it?"

"Not, I admit, unless he wanted a job in this country!" began Miss
Coppinger grimly, and again remembered that intolerance was not to be
encouraged. "The end of it is that I shall endeavour to do _my
duty_--which is, apparently, to do everything that I most entirely
disapprove of--and that on the day Larry is twenty-one, I shall march
out of Coppinger's Court, and dance a jig, and then he may have the
Pope to stay with him if he likes!"

While Miss Coppinger was thus belabouring and releasing her conscience
in the drawing-room, quite another matter was engaging the attention
of her ward, and of his entertainers at the school-room tea-table.
This was no less a thing than the dissolving of the existing Bands,
and the formation of a new society, to be known as "The Companions of
Finn."

Larry Coppinger's entrance, literally at a bound, into the
Talbot-Lowry family group, had landed him, singularly enough, into the
heart of their affection and esteem. He was now the originator of this
revolutionary scheme, and having in him that special magnetic force
that confers leadership, the scheme was being put through.

"The point is," he said, eagerly, "that when we are split up into two
bands, we can do nothing much, but the lot of us together might--might
make quite a difference."

"Difference to what?" said Richard, ex-chief of the Elder Statesmen,
unsympathetically. Like his father before him, he disliked change.

"Well, hold on!" said Larry, quickly, "wait just one minute, and I'll
tell you. I got the notion out of a book I found in the library. I
don't expect I'd have thought of it myself--" Larry's transparent
sky-blue eyes sought Richard's appealingly. "It's--it's only poems,
you know, but it's most frightfully interesting--I brought it with
me--"

"Oh--poems!" said Richard, without enthusiasm. "Are they long ones?"

"I don't seem to care so awfully much about poetry," abetted Judith,
late Second-in-command.

John looked sapient, and said, neutrally, that some poetry wasn't bad.

The Twins, who were engaged in a silent but bitter struggle for the
corpse of a white rabbit, recently born dead