line and
essentially opposed to their own, was wafted towards them.

"I've done wiv bibs," he repeated.

"That will do, Max," said Miss Bibby, coldly. "I shall consider you in
disgrace, until you have told Anna and Muffie you are sorry."

"I've done wiv bibs," shouted Max.

"Go and stand in that corner, Max," Miss Bibby said with unexpected
sternness in her tone.

Max scrambled off his chair as if he could hardly reach the place
indicated fast enough.

He ran right into the corner--gave a hard kick at the skirting board and
made a rush for the door.

"I've done wiv bibs," he shrieked, and tore away as fast as his legs
could carry him into the garden.

"Go on with your breakfast, Lynn," said Miss Bibby with as much calmness
as she could muster,--"sit down immediately, Muffie--" for Muffie,
excited by the unusual happening, had flown to the window to see where
the rebel was heading for, "Max has forgotten himself, I am afraid."

This was ever Miss Bibby's phrase--ever her gentle optimism. If you lost
your temper, your manners, your courage, any of your higher qualities,
you had "forgotten yourself," forgotten the fine, upright man you were
by nature and become for a moment the shadowy ghost of that black
unknown self that ever dogs one.

"As I have finished, I will ask you to excuse me, little girls," Miss
Bibby continued, rising from her seat. In point of fact, she had not yet
consumed the whole of her slender meal, but who was to say what a boy
with such a red, fierce little face might be doing?

She crossed the grass with troubled eyes. Max was too busy a little man
to have fits like this often.

Now and again in wet weather, certainly, when he could not work off any
superfluous steam in the garden, he had lately taken to flinging himself
flat on the floor and kicking, if thwarted in any way. And Miss Bibby
had vaguely recognized that this was due to his being deprived so long
of the healthy moral tone of the presence of his mother and father--the
latter in especial.

Anna opined that the easiest way to get him out of these "tantrums" was
to bribe him with the offer of a large piece of chocolate.

"He's only a baby," she would say excusingly, "and besides, he's a
boy--it's in him and it's got to come out,--same as a measle rash. You'd
think there'd be some med'cin for it, wouldn't you?"

Kinross would have enjoyed the notion--the need of a Tonic for
Eliminating the Black Corpuscles from the Blood of