Billy was at first disposed to protest, but something at once merry and tender in the man’s blue eyes disarmed suspicion; and when he presently found himself hoisted on a broad shoulder, and was thus carried at galloping speed down the lane and through the village; when, moreover, this self-constituted steed actually vaulted the garden gate, and covered the tiny path that intervened between it and the cottage door with two strides, he was not only reassured but jubilant. They could see “mammy” bending over the wash-tub through the open kitchen door, very red in the face, very wet and draggled as to dress, and with one end of her hair straggling down; and the queer thing was that at sight of her the man suddenly came to a standstill and uttered a kind of choking cry. And then mammy turned round and dropped the shirt she had been wringing out, and fairly screamed as she came rushing across the kitchen. Then laughing and crying together she flung her arms round the brown man’s neck, heedless of the danger to which she was exposing herself from the broken jam-pot and the rusty knife which Billy was still brandishing; and kissed him, and rocked backwards and forwards with him, and seemed altogether to have taken leave of her senses. After a moment’s breathless pause of astonishment, Billy thought it time to assert himself. He dropped his two treasures on the floor and burst into a loud wail. Then clutching hold of the newcomer’s close-cropped fair head, he endeavoured with all his might to pull it away from the curly one that was pressed so close to it. And then mammy looked up, and her eyes were all wet, but her mouth was laughing. “You mustn’t do that, sonny,” she said. “This is dada! Dada’s come home.” Billy was dumb with dismay and disappointment, partly at the discovery that the much-talked-of and hitherto unimagined dada was a man, partly because he was such a very brown man, but chiefly because he had arrived shorn of the glories of the ship and the puff-puff which he had understood were to accompany him. So he sat still and rather sulky on the khaki shoulder while Private Bunce explained how he had caught sight of the little chap, and how he at once “spotted” him by that little nose of his, and how disappointed he had been when for a moment he had thought it was not his Billy after all, but some other quite uninteresting Billy belonging to another fellow. “But I found him all right,” he summed up triumphantly, “and I found you, little woman--lookin’ tip-top you are, just about! Lard, it do seem a mortal time since I left you, my girl.” “Oh, Bill, I meant to have everything so nice for ’ee,” cried Nellie. “Dear, to think there’s nothin’ ready! I’m sure I’m not fit to be seen myself.”