“Oh Lord, whatever is to be the end of it all? Learning is the ruin of the whole place, and yet them children is as ignorant as bears, excepting for their queer words and ways. Set them to read a Royal Reader or to tot up a sum, bless you, they couldn’t for the life of them. And the tempers of the two,” she went on, putting the cross stitches on a darn, “their parents had no hand in them anyway. Where they got ’em from the Lord only knows. Tempers, indeed! And from them two blessed babies as bore ’em.” She lifted her head and glanced out of the window. “Look at ’em,” she whispered, “hand in hand up and down the drive, talking mathymatics, I’ll be bound,” and Mary’s eyes returned to her basket a trifle moist. She had nursed Mrs. Waring and Mrs. Waring’s children, and she was a good soul with a deal of sentiment about her. As it happened, Mr. and Mrs. Waring were not discussing mathematics. They were just then deeply and solemnly exercised in their minds as to the exact date of a skeleton recently unearthed from some red sandstone in the neighbourhood. They had dismissed the carriage at the hall gates, and were now hot in argument concerning the bones, each holding diametrically opposed views on the subject, and struggling hard to prove his or her side. Now and again the husband’s voice rose to a pretty high pitch, and his fine mouth was touched with a sneer, and the wife’s eyes flashed and flamed and shot out indignant wrath. Her hat had fallen off far down the drive, and her rings of yellow fluffy hair fell wildly over her forehead, one small hand was clenched in eager protest, but the other was clasped tight in her husband’s. They always went like this, these two; they had got into the foolish way very early in their acquaintance and had never been able to get out of it. Suddenly some common hypothesis struck them both at once, and Mrs. Waring cried out with a gasp, “If we can prove it, I am right.” “Yes, if you can prove it, darling, that’s the point, and I hope that you never will. Have you any idea, dear love, what the proving of this will undo, what it must upset?” “I think I have,” she said slowly, her blue eyes gleaming eagerly, “but it seems to me whenever a great hubbub is made about the upsetting of some theory, that it generally ends in being much ado about nothing, and that the new thing that springs from the ashes of the old dead, is infinitely more beautiful than ever its predecessor was, for it is one step nearer the truth.” “Dearest, we must end our talk,” groaned Mr. Waring, peering with terrified looks through his eyeglasses. “Here is Gwen, most slightly clad and of a bright blue tint, pursued by Mary. I fear very much that story of Boadicea you told her has instigated her to this action. I think, dearest, I will go to the study and work out this question of date.”