ered the pretty face without
any assistance.

"This lady is your American cousin, Carnaby," said Mark. "Did you know
you had one?"

"I don't think I did," answered the boy, "but it's never too late to
mend!" He attempted a bow of finished grown-upness, failed somewhat,
and melted at once into an engaging boyishness, under which his
frank admiration of his new-found relative was not to be hidden. "I
say, are you stopping at Stoke Revel?" he asked, as though the news
were too good to be true. "Jolly! Hullo--" he broke off with
animation as the cassocked figure of the Rev. Tobias Finch fluttered
out from the porch--"here's old Toby! Watch Miss Smeardon now! She
expects to catch him, you know, but he says he's going to be a
celly--celly-what-d'you-call-'em?"

"Celibate?" suggested Lavendar, with laughing eyes.

"The very word, thank you!" said Carnaby. "Yes: a celibate. Not so
easily nicked, good old Toby--you bet!"

"Do the clergymen over here always dress like that?" inquired
Robinetta, trying to suppress a tendency to laugh at his slang.

"Cassock?" said Carnaby. "Toby wouldn't be seen without it. High, you
know! Bicycles in it. Fact! Goes to bed in it, I believe."

"Carnaby, Carnaby! Come away!" said Lavendar. "Restrain these flights
of imagination! Don't you see how they shock Mrs. Loring?"

Before the Manor was reached, Robinetta and Carnaby had sworn eternal
friendship deeper than any cousinship, they both declared. They met
upon a sort of platform of Stoke Revel, predestined to sympathy upon
all its salient characteristics; two naughty children on a holiday.

"Do you get enough to eat here?" asked Carnaby in a hollow whisper, in
the drawing-room before lunch.

"Of course I have enough, Middy," answered Robinetta with unconscious
reservation. She had rejected "Carnaby" at once as a name quite
impossible: he was "Middy" to her almost from the first moment of
their acquaintance.

"Enough?" he ejaculated, "_I_ don't! I'd never be fed if it weren't
for old Bates and Mrs. Smith and Cooky." Bates was the butler, Mrs.
Smith the housekeeper, and Cooky her satellite. "Nobody gets enough to
eat in this house!" added Carnaby darkly, "except the dog."

At the lunch-table, the antagonism natural between a hot-blooded
impetuous boy and a grandmother such as Mrs. de Tracy became rather
painfully apparent. He had already been hauled over the coals for his
arrival on Sunday and his indecorous appearance in church after