," said Augustine smiling,
"they were jumping all over the place."

"Oh, as long as they weren't toads!" said Lady Channice, her smile
lighting in response. "When I came here first to live there were so many
toads, in the stone areas, you know, under the gratings in front of the
cellar windows. You can't imagine how many! It used quite to terrify me
to look at them and I went to the front of the house as seldom as
possible. I had them all taken away, finally, in baskets,--not killed,
you know, poor things,--but just taken and put down in a field a mile
off. I hope they didn't starve;--but toads are very intelligent, aren't
they; one always associates them with fairy-tales and princes."

She had gone to the tea-table while she spoke and was pouring the
boiling water into the teapot. Her voice had pretty, flute-like ups and
downs in it and a questioning, upward cadence at the end of sentences.
Her upper lip, her smile, the run of her speech, all would have made one
think her humorous, were it not for the strain of nervousness that one
felt in her very volubility.

Her son lent her a kindly but rather vague attention while she talked to
him about the toads, and his eye as he stood watching her make the tea
was also vague. He sat down presently, as if suddenly remembering why he
had come in, and it was only after a little interval of silence, in
which he took his cup from his mother's hands, that something else
seemed to occur to him as suddenly, a late arriving suggestion from her
speech.

"What a horribly gloomy place you must have found it."

Her eyes, turning on him quickly, lost, in an instant, their uncertain
gaiety.

"Gloomy? Is it gloomy? Do you feel it gloomy here, Augustine?"

"Oh, well, no, not exactly," he answered easily. "You see I've always
been used to it. You weren't."

As she said nothing to this, seeming at a loss for any reply, he went on
presently to talk of other things, of the book he had been reading, a
heavy metaphysical tome; of books that he intended to read; of a letter
that he had received that morning from the Eton friend with whom he was
going up to Oxford for his first term. His mother listened, showing a
careful interest usual with her, but after another little silence she
said suddenly:

"I think it's a very nice place, Charlock House, Augustine. Your father
wouldn't have wanted me to live here if he'd imagined that I could find
it gloomy, you know."

"Oh, of course not," said