grace to the bird, who, obeying, had shrilly
piped, "Tumble up, men, tumble up," until Hobson the maid suddenly
surged, from the second-class and ploughed her way through the
delighted crowd.

"Give the purse and bracelet to my maid, you------"

"Swab," supplemented the parrot.

"-----at once," finished her grace, just as, with a cry of "Here's
Dad!" Damaris ran to meet her father, who, having got hung up in the
traffic, had failed to meet the train. He listened patiently, with
dancing eyes, to the story, smiled across at the duchess, gave the man
a pound-note and a jolly good talking to, and acquired a bull pup with
the Rodney Stone strain, which they promptly christened Wellington, as
it had won at Waterloo.

Wellington forthwith developed an inordinate jealousy of Jane Coop.

Jane Coop was maid, adviser and buffer to the girl whom she loved more
than anyone on earth.

Born on the Squire's lands, she had developed a positive genius for
mothering delicate lambs and calves and sickly chicks, so that when a
crisis had arrived almost immediately after the birth of Damaris, the
Squire had bundled the highly-certificated nurse into a motor and sent
her packing back to London, and called upon Jane Coop to rise to the
occasion.

She had risen.

Bonny and plump, she had taken the weakly little bit of humanity, also
the situation, into her strong, capable hands; treated the mother and
babe just as she would have treated a couple of delicate lambs, and
pulled them both through.

From that day forth she had dominated the house, tyrannised over the
Squire and his lady, defied each and every governess who had shown
signs of undue strictness, and found her reward for her devotion in the
love of the child who teased her to death and--in the long run--obeyed
her.

She had shown herself a positive sheep-dog on board the boat. She had
rounded up her white lamb and yapped upon the heels of those who dared
approach with too great familiarity; had bristled and shown her teeth
upon every possible occasion, until those who would fain have led the
girl into new and verdant pastures had fled at the sheep-dog's
approach, leaving them both to enjoy the novelty of everything, each
after her own kind.

Damaris revelled in it all: the seagulls; the lighthouses; the ships
that passed in the day and night; and the tail-end of a storm they hit
up in the Bay, whilst Jane Coop invented new verses to the Litany as
she tried, in her ca