Jimmy Marrable was a little eccentric,--but so are most old bachelors,--and like a good many eccentric men he rather prided himself on his peculiarities. If anything, he rather cultivated them. One of his most startling characteristics was a habit of thinking aloud. He would emerge unexpectedly from a brown study, to comment to himself with stunning suddenness and absolute candour on the appearance and manners of those around him. It was credibly reported that he had once taken a rather intense and voluble lady in to dinner, and after regarding her for some time with a fixity of attention which had deluded the good soul into the belief that he was hanging on her lips, had remarked to himself, with appalling distinctness, during a lull in the conversation: "Guinea set--misfit at the top--gutta-percha fixings--wonder they don't drop into her soup!" and continued his meal without any apparent consciousness of having said anything unusual. He was eccentric, too, about other matters. Once Hughie, returning from school for his holidays, discovered that there had been an addition to the family in his absence. Mrs. Capper's very face in the hall told him that something was wrong. Its owner informed Hughie that though one should be prepared to take life as one found it, and live and let live had been her motto from infancy, her equilibrium ever since the thing had happened had lain at the mercy of the first aggressively disposed feather that came along, and what people in the neighbourhood would say she dared not think. She ran on. Hughie waited patiently, and presently unearthed the facts. A few weeks ago the master had returned from a protracted visit to London, bringing with him two children. He had announced that the pair were henceforth to be regarded as permanent inmates of the establishment. Beyond the fact that one brat was fair and a boy and the other darkish and a girl, and that Mrs. Capper had given warning on sight, Hughie could elicit nothing, and waited composedly for his uncle to come home from shooting. Jimmy Marrable, when he arrived, was not communicative. He merely stated that the little devils were the children of an old friend of his, called Gaymer, who had died suddenly and left them to be brought up by him as guardian. "And Hughie, my son," he concluded, "if you don't want your head bitten off you will refrain in this case from indulging in your propensity for asking why and getting to the bottom of things. I'm not best pleased at finding them on my hands, but here they are and there's an end of it. The girl is five--ten years younger than you--and the boy's eight. She is called Joan, and his idiotic name is Lancelot Wellesley. I wonder they didn't christen him Galahad Napoleon! Come upstairs and see them."