mouth, and on the scroll the words, "Because I
am ugly I need not be hateful!" His tutor, who had a nasty way of
creeping up behind people, came up behind him at the wrong moment.
Dickie was caned on both hands and kept in. Also his dinner was of bread
and water, and he had to write out two hundred times, "I am a bad boy,
and I ask the pardon of my good tutor. The fifth day of November, 1608."
So he did not see his aunt and cousin in their Whitehall finery--and it
was quite late in the afternoon before he even saw his other cousin, who
had been sampler-sewing. He would not have written out the lines, he
felt sure he would not, only he thought of his cousin and wanted to see
her again. For she was the only little girl friend he had.

When the last was done he rushed into the room where she was--he was
astonished to find that he knew his way about the house quite well,
though he could not remember ever having been there before--and cried
out--

"Thy task done? Mine is, too. Old Parrot-nose kept me hard at it, but I
thought of thee, and for this once I did all his biddings. So now we are
free. Come play ball in the garden!"

His cousin looked up from her sampler, set the frame down and jumped up.

"I am so glad," she said. "I do hate this horrid sampler!"

And as she said it Dickie had a most odd feeling, rather as if a clock
had struck, or had stopped striking--a feeling of sudden change. But he
could not wait to wonder about it or to question what it was that he
really felt. His cousin was waiting.

"Come, Elfrida," he said, and held out his hand. They went together into
the garden.

Now if you have read a book called "The House of Arden" you will already
know that Dickie's cousins were called Edred and Elfrida, and that their
father, Lord Arden, had a beautiful castle by the sea, as well as a
house in London, and that he and his wife were great favorites at the
Court of King James the First. If you have not read that book, and
didn't already know these things--well, you know them now. And Arden was
Dickie's own name too, in this old life, and his father was Sir Richard
Arden, of Deptford and Aylesbury. And his tutor was Mr. Parados, called
Parrot-nose "for short" by his disrespectful pupils.

Dickie and Elfrida played ball, and they played hide-and-seek, and they
ran races. He preferred play to talk just then; he did not want to let
out the fact that he remembered nothing whatever of the doings of the
last mon