Of course the Master of the Ceremonies in the Day-nursery was Master
Pennybet. Master Doe was his devoted mate. The first game was a
disgusting one, called "Spits." It consisted in the two combatants
facing each other with open umbrellas, and endeavouring to register
points by the method suggested in the title of the game; the
umbrella was a shield, with which to intercept any good shooting.
Luckily for their self-respect in later years, this difficult game
soon yielded place to an original competition, known as "Fire and
Water." You placed a foot-bath under that portable gas-stove which
was in the Day-nursery; you lit all the trivets in the stove to
represent a house on fire; and you had a pail, ready to be filled
from the bathroom, which, need we say, was the fire-station. The
rules provided that the winner was he who could extinguish the
conflagration raging in the foot-bath in the shortest possible time,
and with the least expenditure of water. But the natural desire to
win and to record good times meant that you were apt, in the haste
and enthusiasm of the moment, to miss the bath entirely, and to
flood quite a different part of the nursery. It was this flaw in an
otherwise simple game, which brought the play to an end. Intimations
that an aquatic tourney of some sort was the feature in the
Day-nursery began to leak through to the room below. The competitors
were apprehended and brought for judgment before the ladies, who
were sitting in the garden and watching the Fal as it streamed by to
the sea.

"They had better go and play in the Beach Grove," sighed Lady Gray.

This ruling Archie did not veto or contest, for he had wearied of
indoor amusements, and felt that the well-timbered groves would
afford new avenues for play. So the boys departed like deer among
the trunks of the trees.

It was a cosy conversation which the ladies enjoyed after this. Any
conversation would be cosy that had been reared in the glory of such
a garden, and in the comfort of those lazy chairs. Mrs. Pennybet
began by declaring, as these shameless ladies do, that her hostess's
fair-haired nephew was quite the most beautiful child she had ever
seen; she could hug him all day; nay, she could eat him. And,
thereupon Lady Gray told her the whole story of Edgar Gray Doe; how
his mother had been Sir Peter's sister, and the loveliest woman in
Western Cornwall; how she had paid with her life for Edgar's being;
and how her husband, the chief of