or wildly hope to catch up a pair of brown muscular little
legs? She was brought up panting, with her hand at her side before they
had circled the bamboos three times and the quarry was plainly as fresh
as ever. But:

"Escape me never, beloved,
While I am I and you are you."

was Miss Bibby's attitude now. She called to Anna to help with the
chase. And Anna came cheerfully as well as of necessity, for Max had
crushed mulberries on her snowy kitchen table, in an endeavour to
"invent cochineal," and it would take her hours to eradicate the stain.

The little girls came too--they felt it was more than half a game, for
Max's face was perfectly smiling and good-natured.

So Pauline stood guard at the waratahs, and Lynn and Anna prevented any
more dodging at the bamboos, and Miss Bibby cut off the retreat to the
house and Muffie worried him in the rear.

Surely, surely by tactics like these they drove him right into a corner.
Had there been a fence he would have shown fight a little longer by
scrambling up it and continuing the chase on the other side. But they
had headed him to a hedge, an African box thorn hedge, and there was
nothing more to be done. So he stuck his legs apart, and put his hands
in his pockets and surveyed his captors as they closed in round him. And
it seemed satisfactory to his self-respect that it had taken five of
them--two quite grown-up, too--to beat him.

But Anna was singularly without the capacity for admiring fine deeds and
simply grasped him firmly around the middle and bore him to the house.

He kicked all the way, merely to maintain his self-respect.

"Where shall I put 'im?" gasped the girl, stumbling along the hall, the
other four at her heels.

"Here, here," said Miss Bibby, opening the sitting-room door, and
running across the floor to close and lock the French windows.

Anna stood him down on his feet and gave him one good, if unauthorized,
shake for all the kicks she had received.

"There!" she said, as a woman will.

[Illustration: "The boy glared round at his victors."]

And it was precisely at this point the "language," feelingly alluded to
before, happened.

The boy glared round at his victors, now all grouped at the door.

"You beasly girls," he said.

CHAPTER XX

A LESSON IN DISCIPLINE

That is why "Greenways" should have hidden its shamed head in one of the
mountain's tender mists instead of gaily smiling out at the world that
morning.

When