"That's what I said to 'er, but she wouldn't do it. She's shy. And that there Master Roland, 'e do override everything and everybody. He's that spoiled that there's no----" "Oh, come now, Nurse, you're as bad as everybody else with him! You always say he's charming." "Well, so 'e is. I will say this for 'im--that he never gives me a back answer. That there Miss Clare, she could 'old 'er own so far as tongue goes with an East-End street child. Master Roland, 'e corrects her for it. 'E says: 'Now, Clare, you mustn't speak like that to Nurse.' Then he told 'er as somebody called George Meredith, that their mother thinks a lot of, said he wanted 'em all to be polite above all things." "That's it, you see," said Miss Torry again. She was a delightful creature, but she always felt rather uncomfortable under Old Nurse's severe eye. It has always been a mystery to me why I am supposed to have spoiled Little Yeogh Wough. My hand was always over him, invisibly keeping him down. He had more punishments than the others had. But he had a charm that took the sternness out of discipline and a wonderful knack of knowing the right thing to say, and when to say it. And he knew how to give way with a quite princely grace. "Roland," I said to him one day, rejoining him in the car in which he had been waiting for me outside a house where I had been paying a formal call. "I have just heard someone say a very silly thing. She--it was a woman--said how much more right and proper it would be if the words under the Prince of Wales's feathers were: '_I rule_,' instead of '_I serve_.' You can see the silliness of that, can't you?" He nodded. "You told me one day that 'I serve' is much grander." "Of course it is. Any empty-headed cock on a dirt heap can crow out 'I rule,' and it doesn't mean anything much; but it takes a great man to say 'I serve,' and when a great man does say it you feel that he's a king. You know, Little Yeogh Wough, empty show doesn't mean much. We're very fond of beautiful things, you and I, but----" "Oh, yes!" he put in. "That's why I asked you to let me come with you to-day, because it was the first time you were wearing your new hat."