erness; and perhaps, in a roundabout sort of
way, he was. But that comes at the far end of the story, and is doubtful
at best; and in the meanwhile the child had gone through his suffering,
and the governess had in some measure expiated her fault; so that at
this stage it is only necessary to note that the whole business began
because the Empty House happened to be really an Empty House--not the
one Jimbo's family lived in, but another of which more will be known in
due course.

Jimbo's father was a retired Colonel, who had married late in life, and
now lived all the year round in the country; and Jimbo was the youngest
child but one. The Colonel, lean in body as he was sincere in mind, an
excellent soldier but a poor diplomatist, loved dogs, horses, guns and
riding-whips. He also really understood them. His neighbours, had they
been asked, would have called him hard-headed, and so far as a
soft-hearted man may deserve the title, he probably was. He rode two
horses a day to hounds with the best of them, and the stiffer the
country the better he liked it. Besides his guns, dogs and horses, he
was also very fond of his children. It was his hobby that he understood
them far better than his wife did, or than any one else did, for that
matter. The proper evolution of their differing temperaments had no
difficulties for him. The delicate problems of child-nature, which defy
solution by nine parents out of ten, ceased to exist the moment he
spread out his muscular hand in a favourite omnipotent gesture and
uttered some extraordinarily foolish generality in that thunderous,
good-natured voice of his. The difficulty for himself vanished when he
ended up with the words, "Leave that to me, my dear; believe me, I know
best!" But for all else concerned, and especially for the child under
discussion, this was when the difficulty really began.

Since, however, the Colonel, after this chapter, mounts his best hunter
and disappears over a high hedge into space so far as our story is
concerned, any further delineation of his wholesome but very ordinary
type is unnecessary.

One winter's evening, not very long after Christmas, the Colonel made a
discovery. It alarmed him a little; for it suggested to his cocksure
mind that he did not understand _all_ his children as comprehensively as
he imagined.

Between five o'clock tea and dinner--that magic hour when lessons were
over and the big house was full of shadows and mystery--there came