And yet people have always accused me of spoiling him! "You see, Little Yeogh Wough," I explained to him in one of our good-night talks more than a week later. "I want you to grow up to be a real man, and not a sham one. That is why you must obey. Suppose, when you grow up, you became a soldier--an officer--and you were ordered to take your men to a certain spot on a battlefield by a certain time, and you said to yourself in a slouchy way that a minute late in starting or arriving wouldn't matter. Well, then, do you know what would happen? Things would go wrong in that battle, and very likely your men would be shot down by the guns of your own people; because, you see, the order would have been given to fire just when you were due to have cleared out of a certain place--and if you haven't cleared out you yourself are to blame for any mischief that is done. And it's the same in life. There's a plan in everything, if you look for it, and if we are disobedient and don't keep time, we put that plan all wrong." But that first night I did not have a good-night talk with him at all. He did not ask me to come and see him in bed, though before I left home he had been heartbroken at the prospect of my nightly talks with him being interrupted. For a further and shocking proof of his new naughtiness had come to light. Miss Torry, searching in the pockets of his inelegant and despised overcoat, had pulled forth something which drew from her a louder "Lor'!" than ever I had heard her utter before. She held the something up and revealed a long thick tress of coppery brown hair. "Roland!" I exclaimed. "What is that?" "It's a piece of Clare's hair," he told us, at once and quite frankly. Even in his worst moods I never knew him tell an untruth. "I cut it off just before I came away from home, so I hadn't time to put it anywhere but in my pocket. I did it because she wouldn't let me do cooking on her toy kitchen range, that works with methylated spirit. I just got my scissors quickly and cut it. Nobody knew I did it, though I dare say Nurse has found out by now." "Oh, Roland!" My reproachful exclamation was accompanied by a stream of reproaches from the horrified Miss Torry. I remembered then that all through his few short years hitherto Little Yeogh Wough had shown a great interest in cooking. And he had never even seen the kitchen, or any part of the basement, of his London home yet. He had called the basement "Griffiths's Dark," when he was two and a half, because Griffiths was the name of the cook who reigned there at that time; and the name had stuck. We had all spoken of the basement ever since as "Griffiths's Dark." And so his curious leanings towards cooking had led him to such a breach of good conduct as the cutting off of a goodly portion of his four-and-a-half-year-old sister's hair because she would not let him use her toy range with methylated spirit! In very deed he had fallen from grace during this fortnight of lax discipline.