* * * *

At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent
for his father and mother. Something had happened.

Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt most
awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone away. And
Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party and Michael a
tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he wouldn't take the
trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the trumpet?

And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night nursery, he
called them back again.

"It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he laughed.

IV

It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever happened, and
something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. When he scaled
the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault
and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself
up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow
gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't
care. I liked it," before anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna
stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I
don't care. I shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't
care came to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be
life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen,
would ever take him at a disadvantage.

Two years passed and he was just the same.

Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.

But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had
to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first
admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when
it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for
tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father's
bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to
the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.

"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it," said Nicky.

Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton
Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't gone in
after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to bed at four
o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up
an