he
turned the small face upward, and watched it break into a smile.
"Well, well. A mountain boy, eh?--from the lake of Geneva. H'm. _Il
a dans les yeux un coin du lac._"

At this happy description the tears of pleasure sprang to the
foolish eyes of Mrs. Ray, while Rupert, thinking with much wisdom
that all the conditions were favourable, gazed up into the Colonel's
face, and fired his last shot.

"What really was the fair-haired knight's name?"

"Perhaps you will know some day," answered the Colonel, half
playfully, half wearily.

Sec.2

In the course of the same summer Master Archibald Pennybet, of
Wimbledon, celebrated his eighth birthday. He celebrated it by a
riotous waking-up in the sleeping hours of dawn; he celebrated it by
a breakfast which extended him so much that his skin became
unbearably tight; and then, in a new white sailor-suit and brown
stockings turned over at the calves to display a couple of
magnificent knees, he celebrated some more of it in the garden.
There on the summer lawn he stood, unconsciously deliberating how
best to give new expression to the personality of Archibald
Pennybet. He was dark, gloriously built, and possessed eyes that
lazily drooped by reason of their heavy lashes; and, I am sorry to
say, he evoked from a boudoir window the gurgling admiration of his
fashionable mother, who, while her hair was being dressed, allowed
her glance to swing from her hand-mirror, which framed a gratifying
vision of herself, to the window, which framed a still more
gratifying vision of her son. "He gets his good looks from me," she
thought. And, having noticed the drooping of his eyelids,
over-weighted with lashes, she brought her hand-mirror into play
again. "He is lucky," she added, "to have inherited those lazy eyes
from me."

Soon Archie retired in the direction of the kitchen-garden. The
kitchen-garden, with its opportunities of occasional refreshment
such as would not add uncomfortably to his present feeling of
tightness, was the place for a roam. Five minutes later he was
leaning against the wire-netting of the chicken-run, and offering an
old cock, who asked most pointedly for bread, a stone. To know how
to spend a morning was no easier on a birthday than on any ordinary
day.

Suddenly, however, he overheard the gardener mentioning a murder
which had been committed on Wimbledon Common, a fine tract of wild
jungle and rolling prairie, that lay across the main road. Without
waiti