ch it could never otherwise have possessed.
Mrs. Sangrail was almost equally devoted to her card winnings, but the
prospect of conveniently warehousing her offspring for six days, and
incidentally saving his railway fare to the north, reconciled her to
the sacrifice; when Clovis made a belated appearance at the
breakfast-table the bargain had been struck.

"Just think," said Mrs. Sangrail sleepily; "Lady Bastable has very
kindly asked you to stay on here while I go to the MacGregors'."

Clovis said suitable things in a highly unsuitable manner, and
proceeded to make punitive expeditions among the breakfast dishes with
a scowl on his face that would have driven the purr out of a peace
conference. The arrangement that had been concluded behind his back
was doubly distasteful to him. In the first place, he particularly
wanted to teach the MacGregor boys, who could well afford the
knowledge, how to play poker-patience; secondly, the Bastable catering
was of the kind that is classified as a rude plenty, which Clovis
translated as a plenty that gives rise to rude remarks. Watching him
from behind ostentatiously sleepy lids, his mother realized, in the
light of long experience, that any rejoicing over the success of her
manoeuvre would be distinctly premature. It was one thing to fit
Clovis into a convenient niche of the domestic jig-saw puzzle; it was
quite another matter to get him to stay there.

Lady Bastable was wont to retire in state to the morning-room
immediately after breakfast and spend a quiet hour in skimming through
the papers; they were there, so she might as well get their money's
worth out of them. Politics did not greatly interest her, but she was
obsessed with a favourite foreboding that one of these days there would
be a great social upheaval, in which everybody would be killed by
everybody else. "It will come sooner than we think," she would observe
darkly; a mathematical expert of exceptionally high powers would have
been puzzled to work out the approximate date from the slender and
confusing groundwork which this assertion afforded.

On this particular morning the sight of Lady Bastable enthroned among
her papers gave Clovis the hint towards which his mind had been groping
all breakfast time. His mother had gone upstairs to supervise packing
operations, and he was alone on the ground-floor with his hostess--and
the servants. The latter were the key to the situation. Bursting
wildly into the