any assistance? If you
could allow me----?"

There was a stifled explosion of laughter and the grown-up Lamb
(otherwise Devereux) turned the tail of an angry eye in its direction.

"You're very kind," said the lady, looking at the Lamb. She looked
rather shy, but, as the boys put it, there didn't seem to be any
nonsense about her.

"But oh," whispered Cyril, "I should have thought he'd had enough
bicycle-mending for one day--and if she only knew that really and truly
he's only a whiny-piny, silly little baby!"

"He's _not_," Anthea murmured angrily. "He's a dear--if people only let
him alone. It's our own precious Lamb still, whatever silly idiots may
turn him into--isn't he, Pussy?"

Jane doubtfully supposed so.

Now, the Lamb--whom I must try to remember to call St. Maur--was
examining the lady's bicycle and talking to her with a very grown-up
manner indeed. No one could possibly have supposed, to see and hear him,
that only that very morning he had been a chubby child of two years
breaking other people's Waterbury watches. Devereux (as he ought to be
called for the future) took out a gold watch when he had mended the
lady's bicycle, and all the hidden onlookers said "Oh!"--because it
seemed so unfair that the Baby, who had only that morning destroyed two
cheap but honest watches, should now, in the grown-upness to which
Cyril's folly had raised him, have a real gold watch--with a chain and
seals!

Hilary (as I will now term him) withered his brothers and sisters with a
glance, and then said to the lady--with whom he seemed to be quite
friendly--

"If you will allow me, I will ride with you as far as the Cross Roads;
it is getting late, and there are tramps about."

No one will ever know what answer the young lady intended to give to
this gallant offer, for, directly Anthea heard it made, she rushed out,
knocking against a swill pail, which overflowed in a turbid stream, and
caught the Lamb (I suppose I ought to say Hilary) by the arm. The others
followed, and in an instant the four dirty children were visible beyond
disguise.

"Don't let him," said Anthea to the lady, and she spoke with intense
earnestness; "he's not fit to go with anyone!"

"Go away, little girl!" said St. Maur (as we will now call him) in a
terrible voice.

"Go home at once!"

"You'd much better not have anything to do with him," the now reckless
Anthea went on. "He doesn't know who he is. He's something very
different from what