ir damp with
the preparation bought to improve Muffie's thin hair, and her teeth
ashine with the family tooth powder, was on her way to bed, and the mist
had crept up to the windows and wrapped everything in its eerie shroud,
Miss Bibby sighed again.

CHAPTER XIX

MAX RUNS AMUCK

Greenways was overwhelmed with horror. It felt it ought to draw a veil
of mist round its face and shrink from the public gaze instead of
standing there brazenly smiling as usual amid its trees and flowers and
pretending it was the abode of innocence and content.

Miss Bibby was extremely upset, sufficiently so to be nearly helpless in
the crisis. The little girls whispered together with horrified and
excited eyes and more than inclined to a theory that nothing short of a
cable to New Zealand recalling their parents could adequately deal with
the present situation.

Anna, who had quarrelled with her baker, said she was not in the least
surprised, for men and boys were all the same, downright black at heart.

But Max stood fast in his iniquity.

Max, four-year old Max--whose "trousers" did not measure three inches in
the inner seam of the leg--Max, who was not yet entirely initiated into
the difficulties of speech, had broken forth into "language!"

No one knew where he could have possibly heard the hair-raising phrase.
Certainly there was the gardener, Blake, about the premises who, being
of the downright black-hearted sex, might have let fall the words Max
had evidently garnered and laid by with such care and accuracy until
occasion offered.

But he was so surly and monosyllabic a man that the children gave him
the widest of berths, and therefore that theory was unlikely.

Anna aspersed the character of Larkin. A boy with hair that colour, she
maintained, must be subject to periodical explosions, and it was
probably during one of them that Max had secreted his bit of dynamite.
But the little girls gave Larkin the warmest testimonials. In all the
time they had known him he had never been guilty of anything stronger
than "My jiggery!"

It all began with a bib at breakfast time.

When Anna would have tied it around Max's neck, as she or some other
person in her position had done for years, he jerked his head suddenly
aside. "Take it away," he said.

"But, darling," said Miss Bibby, who was serving out the porridge, "you
must have your bib on; don't be naughty. Look, it's the pretty one with
Jack Sprat on it. Tie it on, Ann