their
cabin baggage.

It was all done so briskly and efficiently that it left Ayah and the
children quite breathless, accustomed as they were to the leisurely
methods of the East.

"Who is vat mem?" asked little Fay, as the taxi door was slammed by this
energetic young person.

"Is she quite a mem?" suggested the accurate Tony. "Is she old enough or
big enough?"

"Who is vat mem?" little Fay repeated.

"That," said Jan with considerable satisfaction in her voice, "is Meg."

CHAPTER IX

MEG

It was inevitable as the refrain of a _rondeau_ that when Jan said
"that's Meg" little Fay should demand "What nelse?"

Now there was a good deal of "nelse" about Meg, and she requires some
explanation, going back several years.

Like most Scots, Anthony Ross had been faithful to his relations whether
he felt affection for them or not; sometimes even when they had not a
thought in common with him and he rather disliked them than otherwise.

And this was so in the case of one Amelia Ross, his first cousin, who
was head-mistress of a flourishing and well-established school for
"young ladies," in the Regent's Park district.

She had been a head-mistress for many years, and was well over fifty
when she married a meek, small, nothingly man who had what Thackeray
calls "a little patent place." And it appeared that she added the
husband to the school in much the same spirit as she would have
increased the number of chairs in her dining-room, and with no more
appreciable result in her life. On her marriage she became Mrs.
Ross-Morton, and Mr. Morton went in and out of the front door,
breakfasted and dined at Ribston Hall, caught his bus at the North Gate
and went daily to his meek little work. It is presumed that he lived on
terms of affectionate intimacy with his wife, but no one who saw them
together could have gathered this.

Now Anthony Ross disliked his cousin Amelia. He detested her school,
which he considered was one of the worst examples of a bad old period.
He suspected her of being hard and grasping, he knew she was dull, and
her husband bored him--not to tears, but to profanity. Yet since she was
his cousin and a hard-working, upright woman, and since they had played
together as children in Scotland and her father and mother had been kind
to him then, he could never bring himself to drop Amelia. Not for worlds
would he have allowed Jan or Fay to go to her school, but he did allow
them, or rather he humbly