circle; and she most conscientiously made a point of lessening that
danger on every occasion, by reminding him of his place and rendering
his temporary visits to exalted latitudes as uncomfortable as possible.
Mr Rimbolt, good easy-going gentleman, shrugged his shoulders and felt
powerless to interfere, and when, after a week or two, his librarian
generally pleaded some pressing work as an excuse for not going in to
coffee, he understood it quite well and did not urge the invitation.

Percy, however, had a very different way of comporting himself. What he
liked he liked; what he did not like he most conveniently ignored. He
was anything but a model son, as the reader has discovered. He loved
his parents, indeed, but he sadly lacked that great ornament of youth--a
dutiful spirit. He was spoiled, and got his own way in everything. He
ruled Wildtree Towers, in fact. If his mother desired him to do what he
did not like, he was for the time being deaf, and did not hear her. If
he himself was overtaken in a fault, he changed the subject and talked
cheerily about something else. If one of his great "dodges" came to a
ridiculous end, he promptly screened it from observation by a new one.

From the day of the kidnapping adventure he was a sworn ally of
Jeffreys. It mattered nothing to him who else snubbed the new
librarian, or who else made his life uncomfortable. Percy liked him and
thought much of him. He established a claim on his afternoons, in spite
of Mrs Rimbolt's protests and Mr Rimbolt's arrangements. Even
Jeffreys' refusal to quit work at his bidding counted for nothing. He
represented to his mother that Jeffreys was necessary to his safety
abroad, and to his father that Jeffreys would be knocked up if he did
not take regular daily exercise. He skilfully hinted that Jeffreys read
Aeschylus with him sometimes; and once, as a crowning argument, produced
a complete "dodge," perfected and mechanically clever, "which," he
asserted, "Jeff made me stick to till I'd done."

Mr Rimbolt did not conceal the satisfaction with which he noticed the
good influence on the boy of his new friend, and readily fell in with
the arrangement that Jeffreys' afternoons should be placed at his own
(which meant Percy's) disposal. As for Mrs Rimbolt, she groaned to
think of her boy consorting with quondam tramps, yet consoled herself
with the knowledge that Percy had now some one who would look after him
and keep him out of dange