But you will give that silly ass of a cook his
head, and let him serve up anything he likes. How are you, Clavering?
Things look like going all right for you after all--eh, what? 'Tisn't
every man who can have his rival's wind shut off to order."

The remark could not be said to be a happy one, despite the fact that
the maker of it laughed as though he had just perpetrated a witticism;
for even his doting mother could not but deplore it.

"Harry, darling, how can you?" she said reproachfully, as young
Clavering coloured and the two girls looked distressed and indignant.
"Darling, you ought to think before you speak."

"Huh!" grunted the disgusted General. "If he did, he probably wouldn't
speak at all. It seems to me, Harry, that you must lie awake at nights
planning how you can arrange to say just the wrong thing upon all
occasions--you do it so constantly."

"Oh, that's it--just lay everything on me!" responded his dutiful
offspring sulkily. "I'm always doing the wrong thing--if you believe
what other people say. Seems to me that the best thing I can do is to
take myself off, and then everybody will be happy. I say, Barch, when
you feel like yourself again you'll find me either at the stables or in
the pater's blessed ruin taking lessons in etiquette from the family
ghost--if the pater has been able to rake up one and coax him to reside
there."

And with this ill-natured dig at his father's pet weakness this engaging
young gentleman lurched down the steps of the veranda and walked surlily
away round the angle of the house.

The place which he had spoken of as "the pater's ruin" was a little fad
of the General's, whose love of antiquities and the like had tempted him
to transform a bare and unattractive part of the Grange grounds into
something at least picturesque if not in the very highest good taste.
Ancient ruins had always been a passion with him, but as you can't have
ancient ruins in modern Wimbledon, the General had had a ruin built for
himself, modelling it after the crumbling remains of an old Scottish
castle which had appealed to his artistic eye, planting it with ferns
and enwrapping ivy and vines of Virginia creeper, and even supplying it
with owls and bats to keep up the illusion. It was his one harmless
weakness, his one foible--that ruin; and nobody but his son ever mocked
him for it, though many laughed in their sleeves and secretly made game
of his foolish whim.

Cleek had heard of the "ruin" a