you'll
probably get the idea that I've got two hearts and if Sir Frederick
Treves swore before the Lord Chief Justice that I only had one heart
you'd just say, 'The man's a perfect fool.' You're awful, you know,
Mother."

He used to reprove his mother like that.

Mrs. Perch would give a grim little laugh, relishing her strength, and
then Young Perch would give an involuntary little laugh, accepting his
weakness.

That was how they lived.

Young Perch always carried about in one pocket a private pair of
spectacles for his mother and in another a private set of keys for her
most used receptacles. When the search for her spectacles had exhausted
even her own energy, Young Perch would say, "Well, you'd better use
these, Mother." It was of no use to offer them till she was weakening in
the search, and she would take them grudgingly with, "They don't suit
me." Similarly with the keys, accepted only after prolonged and
maddening search. "Well, you'd better try these, Mother."--"They injure
the lock."

Sabre often witnessed and took part in these devastating searches.
Young Perch would always say, "Now just sit down, Mother, instead of
rushing about, and try to think quite calmly when you last used them."

Mrs. Perch, intensely fatigued, intensely worried:

"How very silly you are, Freddie! I don't know when I last used them. If
I knew when I used them, I should know where they are now."

"Well, you'd better use these now, Mother."

"They don't suit me. They ruin my eyes."

Yet Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perch, who confided much in Sabre, and who had no
confidences of any kind apart from her son, would often say to Sabre:
"Freddie always finds my keys for me, you know. He finds everything for
me, Mr. Sabre."

And the tide of glory would flood amazingly upon her face, transfiguring
it, and Sabre would feel an immensely poignant clutch at the heart.

VI

The Perchs' house was called Puncher's--Puncher's Farm, a few hundred
yards along the lane leading to the great highroad--and it was the
largest and by far the most untidy house in Penny Green. Successive
Punchers of old time, when it had been the most considerable farm in all
the country between Chovensbury and Tidborough, had added to it in
stubborn defiance of all laws of comfort and principles of domestic
architecture, and now, shorn alike of its Punchers and of its pastures,
the homestead that might easily have housed twenty, was mysteriously
filled to overflowin