r you and restore it to you. The
young man, again, had said that anyone would lend me a bottle or a
lemon, but though these were articles on which he seemed ever able to
lay his hand, I found (what I had never noticed before) that there is
a curious dearth of them in the Gardens. The magic egg-cup I usually
carried about with me, and with its connivance I did some astonishing
things with pennies, but even the penny that costs sixpence is
uncertain, and just when you are saying triumphantly that it will
be found in the egg-cup, it may clatter to the ground, whereon some
ungenerous spectator, such as Irene, accuses you of fibbing and
corrupting youthful minds. It was useless to tell her, through clenched
teeth, that the whole thing was a joke, for she understood no jokes
except her own, of which she had the most immoderately high opinion,
and that would have mattered little to me had not David liked them also.
There were times when I could not but think less of the boy, seeing
him rock convulsed over antics of Irene that have been known to every
nursemaid since the year One. While I stood by, sneering, he would give
me the ecstatic look that meant, "Irene is really very entertaining,
isn't she?"

We were rivals, but I desire to treat her with scrupulous fairness, and
I admit that she had one good thing, to wit, her gutta-percha tooth. In
earlier days one of her front teeth, as she told me, had fallen out, but
instead of then parting with it, the resourceful child had hammered it
in again with a hair-brush, which she offered to show me, with the dents
on it. This tooth, having in time passed away, its place was supplied by
one of gutta-percha, made by herself, which seldom came out except when
she sneezed, and if it merely fell at her feet this was a sign that the
cold was to be a slight one, but if it shot across the room she knew she
was in for something notable. Irene's tooth was very favourably known
in the Gardens, where the perambulators used to gather round her to hear
whether it had been doing anything to-day, and I would not have grudged
David his proprietary pride in it, had he seemed to understand that
Irene's one poor little accomplishment, though undeniably showy, was
without intellectual merit. I have sometimes stalked away from him,
intimating that if his regard was to be got so cheaply I begged to
retire from the competition, but the Gardens are the pleasantest club in
London, and I soon returned. How I sco