ards to Uz and
Buz, who grinned sceptically.

Next night, when the Kitten had been very naughty, and Mrs Ffolliot had
punished her, she repeated her prayers with the greatest unction, and
when she reached the usual postscript, fixed her eyes sternly on her
mother's face as she prayed fervently, "And please, dear God, take
great care of the poor little girls what _have_ got mummies."

A mystically minded friend of Mrs Ffolliot's had talked a good deal of
guardian angels to Ger and the Kitten. Ger welcomed the belief with
enthusiasm. It appealed at once to his friendly nature, and the
thought of an angel, "a dear and great angel," all for himself,
specially concerned about him, and there always, though invisible save
to the eye of faith, was a most pleasing conception.

Not that it would have pleased Ger unless he had been assured that
everyone else had one too. And he forthwith constructed a theory that
when people got tired of doing nothing in heaven they came back again
and looked after folks down here.

His views of the angel's actual attributes would much have astonished
his mother's friend had he expressed them. But Ger said nothing, and
quietly constructed an angel after his own heart, who was in point of
fact an angelic sort of soldier servant, never in the way, but always
there and helpful if wanted.

He could not conceive of any servant who was not also a friend, and
having received much kindness from soldiers in the ranks he fixed upon
that type as the most agreeable for a guardian angel. And although he
greatly admired the two framed pictures of angels the lady had given
them to hang in the nursery--Guercino's Angel and Carpaccio's "Tobias
and the angels"--his own particular angel was quite differently clad,
and was called "Spinks" after a horse gunner he had dearly loved, who
was now in India.

The Kitten, far less impressionable, and extremely cautious, was
pleased with the idea when it was first mooted, and discussed the
question exhaustively with Ger, deciding that her angel had large wings
like the one with the child in the picture.

"Does it stay with me in the night-nursery all night?" she enquired.

"'He,' not 'it,'" Ger corrected; "but perhaps yours is a 'she.'"

"I won't have a she," the Kitten said decidedly, for even at four years
old she had already learnt that her own sex had small patience with her
vagaries.

"You'll have to have what's sent you," Ger said solemnly.

"I won't