our picture of the beautiful golden gates.
Do you think I will be able to explain it properly?'

'Yes,' said Bobby, interested at once; 'same as you did to Nobbles and
me. They've got black bodies as well as black hearts, haven't they?
Nurse's brother tells me about black peoples. But, oh! I don't want
you to go. Everybodies I like goes away; and my father is such a
'normous time coming!'

'Poor little Bobby!'

She caressed his curly head with her hand, and added:

'I will keep a sharp look-out for this father of yours, and send him
home to you when I find him.'

'That's what Master Mortimer said; but he's never sent him.'

'Never mind! He'll come back one day,' and with that rather doubtful
consolation Lady Isobel kissed him and said good-bye.

Bobby felt very unhappy for a few days after she left, then began to
make the best of it, and turned more than ever to his beloved
companion, Nobbles. One afternoon he sat up in his favourite
apple-tree watching the white high-road. Presently two boys came along
chasing a poor miserable-looking little dog whose tail was tied to an
old saucepan. The boys were pelting the saucepan with stones, and more
often than not the stones hit the dog, and a yelp of pain was the
result.

Bobby's eyes blazed. He forgot his smallness; he only thought of the
tortured dog.

Shaking Nobbles furiously at them, he leant over the wall and shouted:

'Stop it, you cowards! I tells you to stop! If you don't, I'll come
and make you!'

The boys looked up and laughed at the irate little figure.

'Come on!' they cried. 'We're ready for you, little 'un!'

The dog had fled into a ditch now, and cowered beneath some bramble
bushes. The boys began to pelt him with stones to make him come out,
and Bobby scrambled down from his tree.

'Come on, Nobbles,' he said; 'we'll drive them off, me and you
together!'

He ran to the orchard gate, clambered over it (for it was locked), and
was soon standing over the dog protectingly.

'You shan't touch him. I'll hit you if you do!'

The biggest of the boys laughed at him, and advanced to seize the
crouching dog.

Bobby was so angry that he sprang forward and hit him sharply on the
shoulder. In an instant the boy, who was a bully by nature, had
wrenched his precious stick away from him, and began to belabour him so
unmercifully with it that in a moment poor Nobbles was snapped in two.

And at this juncture Bobby's aunt came upon the scen