"Auntie Joan, Auntie Joan," shrieked Sonny, tumbling off his high-chair with a clatter, and dragging the tablecloth with a medley of spoons and knives after him. The musician was thankful for the diversion at that moment, and forebore to swear as he set his son on his feet again, and held out his hand with a smile to Lady Joan. She was in her riding-habit, and he told himself that she looked like Diana, or any other goddess that represents the woman a man admires. "Well?" she said, with her fresh, breezy laugh, "how soon will you be tired of picknicking and ready to come to terms? And where's Norah?" "Upstairs. There's a draught under the bedroom door, and Mrs. Haxtell has quarrelled violently with nurse. Baby cries perpetually--teeth. And I can't get any breakfast. That's all so far, I think;" and he laughed as heartily as she, and they bumped their heads together under the table in picking up the fallen utensils, and came up again with red faces just as Norah returned with the baby in her arms. "Oh, is it you, Joan? So glad to see you, dear; sit down and have some breakfast. Why haven't you poured out the coffee, Digby? How helpless men are! Take baby a minute, will you? There, you have set her off again, just when I had quieted her. She has taken cold in the night, that's what it is. Hush, hush! There then, it sha'n't, that it sha'n't!" "After all," began the musician in a momentary lull, "I do think Plato--" "Will you give Digby something to eat, Joan, dear?" interposed Norah gently; and peace presently pervaded the breakfast-table. "The lambs _is_ fat, isn't they, daddy?" asked Sonny, from the window-seat. "How does the lambs know, daddy, which sheep is their right mother?" "Confound his precocity," grumbled the musician; "what is one to do with a son like that? Besides, I can't tell him myself; how _do_ they know?" "They don't," said Lady Joan, promptly; "it's a fact I used to dispute with my governess in my youth. It is only we who take it upon ourselves to say that they do; we have no means of proving it. The sheep takes them as they come, and looks equally bored with them all." Digby laughed loudly, and Norah murmured something in a pained voice about maternal instinct. "All nonsense, my dear," persisted Lady Joan, gayly; "no amount of maternal instinct could help a sheep to tell her own lamb from any other sheep's lamb. Besides, why should she want to? As it is, she can have a change without being called fickle. Happy sheep!" Sonny was standing with his legs very wide apart and his blue eyes fixed on her face, as she said this. "Auntie Joan's pertending," he said solemnly. The others laughed, which awoke the slumbering baby again; and Norah, after complaining between its wails that the draught under the bedroom door was answerable for everything, carried it upstairs again by way of curing it.