said Jeremy. "It's generally, I expect, because I
eat too much--at least, the Jampot used to say so. They're in my head
sometimes, too. And then I'm really sick. Do you feel sick?"

Miss Jones began to pull herself together. She wiped her eyes and patted
her hair.

"It's my neuralgia," she said again. "It's from my eyes partly, I
expect."

"It's better to be sick," continued Jeremy, "if you can be--"

She flung him then a desperate look, as though she were really an animal
at bay.

"You see, I can't go away," she said. "I've nowhere to go to. I've no
friends, nor relations, and no one will take me for their children, if
Mrs. Cole says I can't keep order."

"Then I suppose you'd go to the workhouse," continued Jeremy, pursuing
her case with excited interest. "That's what the Jampot always used
to say, that one day she'd end in the workhouse; and that's a horrible
place, SHE said, where there was nothing but porridge to eat, and
sometimes they took all your clothes off and scrubbed your back with
that hard yellow soap they wash Hamlet with."

His eyes grew wide with the horrible picture.

"Oh, Miss Jones, you mustn't go there!"

"Would you mind," she said, "just getting me some water from the jug over
there? There's a glass there."

Still proud of the level to which he had been raised, but puzzled beyond
any words as to this new realisation of Miss Jones, he fetched her the
water, then, standing quite close to her, he said:

"You must stay with us, always."

She looked up at him, and they exchanged a glance.

With that glance Miss Jones learnt more about children than she had ever
learnt before--more, indeed, than most people learn in all their mortal
lives.

"I can't stay," she said, and she even smiled a little, "if you're
always naughty."

"We won't be naughty any more." He sighed. "It was great fun, of course,
but we won't do it any more. We never knew you minded."

"Never knew I minded?"

"At least, we never thought about you at all. Helen did sometimes. She
said you had a headache when you were very yellow in the morning, but I
said it was only because you were old. But we'll be good now. I'll tell
them too--"

Then he added: "But you won't go away now even if we're not always good?
We won't always be, I suppose; and I'm going to school in September,
and it will be better then, I expect. I'm too old, really, to learn with
girls now."

She wanted terribly to kiss him, and, had she done so,