laughed a great rumbling laugh, as lifting the child from the
ground he felt the little hands in his mane of white hair.

"You're nice," she decided, "vewy nice."

"Like to come and stay with me?"

"Oh, yes! if you won't--won't make me----!"

She stopped short.

"Well! what--won't make you what?"

"Nothing--Auntie pulled my dwess!"

The door closed softly.

CHAPTER IV

"The kindest man,
The best conditioned and unwearied spirit
In doing courtesies."--_Shakespeare_.

They met on the threshold.

Swinging back the door to let Leonie and her aunt out, Ellen, the
middle-aged maid, almost an heirloom in the family of Cuxson, bristling
in starched cap and apron, let in the erstwhile plague of her life, but
now as ever the light of her eyes, Jonathan Cuxson, Junior.

He took Lady Hetth's hand in a mighty and painful grip when after a
moment's hesitation she introduced herself.

"Why, of course! You must be Jan! Except for being bigger you haven't
changed a bit since I saw you years ago one Speech Day at Harrow!" She
looked with open admiration at the very personable young man before her
who loomed large in the hall with his height of six feet two and a
tremendous width of shoulder. His eyes were grey, and as honest as a
genuine fine day; the jaw was just saved from a shadow of brutality in
its strength by a remarkably fine mouth; the ears were splendid from an
intellectual point of view, and the set of the head on the neck, and
the neck on the shoulders, perfect. The nose was a good nose, rather
broad at the top, with those delicate sensitive nostrils which usually
spell trouble for the owner.

"I don't believe you remember me!"

Happily the reply which must have been untrue or given in the negative
was averted by the hilarious arrival of a puppy.

Having heard the deep voice associated in its canine mind with bits of
cake and joyous roughs-and-tumbles, it had forsaken the happy though
forbidden hunting ground of the upper storeys and negotiated the stairs
in a series of bumps and misses.

Arrived in the hall it hurled itself blindly against Leonie's ankles,
and ricocheted on to its master's boots, where it essayed a _pas seul_
on its hind legs in its efforts to reach the strong brown hand.

"Oh!" said Leonie, as she fell on her knees with her arms outstretched
to the rampaging ball of white fluff and high spirits, the which
thinking it some new game squatted back on its hind legs with