"Rot!" said Ally. "Cheat!" said Cilly. "Never mind!" said loyal and peaceable Stiffy. "I don't care, really. Let's go on." "It's not fair," cried Cilly. "Poor Stiffy hasn't got a single Family yet. Give it to him, Nicky, you little beast! Daph, make her!" Daphne was the eldest of the flock, and for want of a mother dispensed justice and equity to the rest of the family from the heights of nineteen. For the moment she was assisting the organist, who had inadvertently capsized a portion of his keyboard. Now she returned to the table. "What is it, rabble?" she inquired maternally. A full-throated chorus informed her, and the arbitress detached the threads of the dispute with effortless dexterity. "You said you thought he was asking for Miss Bun and not Bung?" she remarked to the accused. "Yes--that was all," began Nicky. "You see," she continued pathetically, "they're all so beastly unjust to me, and----" Daphne picked up her small sister's pile of completed Families and turned them over. "You couldn't have thought Stiffy wanted _Buns_," she said in measured tones, "because they're here. You collected them yourself. You've cheated again. Upstairs, and no jam till Wednesday!" It is a tribute to Miss Vereker's disciplinary methods that the turbulent Nicky rose at once to her feet and, with a half-tearful, half-defiant reference to her Satanic inhabitant, left the room and departed upstairs, there to meditate on a Bun-strewn past and a jamless future. Daphne Vereker was perhaps the most beautiful of an extraordinarily attractive family. Her full name was Daphne Margaret. Her parents, whether from inherent piety or on the _lucus a non lucendo_ principle, had endowed their offspring with the names of early saints and martyrs. The pagan derivative Daphne was an exception. It had been the name of Brian Vereker's young bride, and had been bestowed, uncanonically linked with that of a saint of blameless antecedents, upon the first baby which had arrived at the Rectory. Mrs Vereker had died eleven years later, two hours after the birth of that fertile genius Anthony Cuthbert, and Brian Vereker, left to wrestle with the upbringing of six children on an insufficient stipend in a remote country parish, had come to lean more and more, in the instinctive but exacting fashion of lonely man, upon the slim shoulders of his eldest daughter.