human yacht. It was better still to watch him patiently
imparting the rudiments to Ronnie, who picked them up as a small boy
will, and worked so hard that the perspiration would stand upon the
smooth brown face for all that wondrous frost. It froze, more or less,
all the rest of those holidays, and the Coplestones never missed a day
until the last of all. I was hoping to find them on the ice at dusk, if
only I could manage to get away in time, but early in the afternoon Uvo
Delavoye came along to disabuse my mind.

"That young Ronnie's caught a chill," said he--"I thought he would.
It'll keep him at home for another day or two, so the ill wind may blow
old Coplestone a bit of good. I'm feeling a bit anxious about him,
Gilly; wild horses won't drag him from this haunted hill! Just at this
moment, however, he's on his way to Richmond to see if he can get
Ronnie the new _Wisden_; and I'm sneaking up to town because I know it's
not to be had nearer. I was wondering if you could make time to look him
up while we're gone?"

I made it there and then at the risk of my place; it was not so often
that I had Ronnie to myself. But at the very gate I ceased to think
about the child. A Pickford van was delivering something at the house.
At a glance I knew it for a six-gallon jar of whisky--to see poor
Coplestone some little way into the Easter term.

Ronnie lay hot and dry in his bed, but brown and bright as he had looked
upon the ice, and sizzling with the exuberance of a welcome that warmed
my heart. He told me, of course, that it was "awful rot" losing the last
day like this; but, on the other hand, he seemed delighted with his
room--he always was delighted with something--and professed himself
rather glad of an opportunity of appreciating it as it deserved. Indeed,
there was not a lazy bone in his little body, and I doubt if he had
spent an unnecessary minute in his bedroom all the holidays. But they
really were delightful quarters, those two adjoining rooms for which no
paper in our stock had been good enough. Both were now radiant in a
sky-blue self-colour that transported one to the tropics, and certainly
looked better than I thought it would when I had the trouble of
procuring it.

In the bedroom the blue was only broken by some simple white furniture,
by a row of books over the bed, and by groups of the little eleven in
which Ronnie already had a place, and photographs of his father at one
or two stages of his great care