e, trying hard to be braver than Phyllis, and to
find more words than Peter had done for explaining in. "We thought you'd
love it. We always have things on our birthdays."

"Oh, yes," said Perks, "your own relations; that's different."

"Oh, no," Bobbie answered. "NOT our own relations. All the servants
always gave us things at home, and us to them when it was their
birthdays. And when it was mine, and Mother gave me the brooch like a
buttercup, Mrs. Viney gave me two lovely glass pots, and nobody thought
she was coming the charity lay over us."

"If it had been glass pots here," said Perks, "I wouldn't ha' said so
much. It's there being all this heaps and heaps of things I can't stand.
No--nor won't, neither."

"But they're not all from us--" said Peter, "only we forgot to put the
labels on. They're from all sorts of people in the village."

"Who put 'em up to it, I'd like to know?" asked Perks.

"Why, we did," sniffed Phyllis.

Perks sat down heavily in the elbow-chair and looked at them with what
Bobbie afterwards described as withering glances of gloomy despair.

"So you've been round telling the neighbours we can't make both
ends meet? Well, now you've disgraced us as deep as you can in the
neighbourhood, you can just take the whole bag of tricks back w'ere it
come from. Very much obliged, I'm sure. I don't doubt but what you meant
it kind, but I'd rather not be acquainted with you any longer if it's
all the same to you." He deliberately turned the chair round so that
his back was turned to the children. The legs of the chair grated on the
brick floor, and that was the only sound that broke the silence.

Then suddenly Bobbie spoke.

"Look here," she said, "this is most awful."

"That's what I says," said Perks, not turning round.

"Look here," said Bobbie, desperately, "we'll go if you like--and you
needn't be friends with us any more if you don't want, but--"

"WE shall always be friends with YOU, however nasty you are to us,"
sniffed Phyllis, wildly.

"Be quiet," said Peter, in a fierce aside.

"But before we go," Bobbie went on desperately, "do let us show you the
labels we wrote to put on the things."

"I don't want to see no labels," said Perks, "except proper luggage ones
in my own walk of life. Do you think I've kept respectable and outer
debt on what I gets, and her having to take in washing, to be give away
for a laughing-stock to all the neighbours?"

"Laughing?" said Peter; "you don't