"A puncture?" he was saying. "Can I not be of any assistance? If you could allow me----?" There was a stifled explosion of laughter and the grown-up Lamb (otherwise Devereux) turned the tail of an angry eye in its direction. "You're very kind," said the lady, looking at the Lamb. She looked rather shy, but, as the boys put it, there didn't seem to be any nonsense about her. "But oh," whispered Cyril, "I should have thought he'd had enough bicycle-mending for one day--and if she only knew that really and truly he's only a whiny-piny, silly little baby!" "He's _not_," Anthea murmured angrily. "He's a dear--if people only let him alone. It's our own precious Lamb still, whatever silly idiots may turn him into--isn't he, Pussy?" Jane doubtfully supposed so. Now, the Lamb--whom I must try to remember to call St. Maur--was examining the lady's bicycle and talking to her with a very grown-up manner indeed. No one could possibly have supposed, to see and hear him, that only that very morning he had been a chubby child of two years breaking other people's Waterbury watches. Devereux (as he ought to be called for the future) took out a gold watch when he had mended the lady's bicycle, and all the hidden onlookers said "Oh!"--because it seemed so unfair that the Baby, who had only that morning destroyed two cheap but honest watches, should now, in the grown-upness to which Cyril's folly had raised him, have a real gold watch--with a chain and seals! Hilary (as I will now term him) withered his brothers and sisters with a glance, and then said to the lady--with whom he seemed to be quite friendly-- "If you will allow me, I will ride with you as far as the Cross Roads; it is getting late, and there are tramps about." No one will ever know what answer the young lady intended to give to this gallant offer, for, directly Anthea heard it made, she rushed out, knocking against a swill pail, which overflowed in a turbid stream, and caught the Lamb (I suppose I ought to say Hilary) by the arm. The others followed, and in an instant the four dirty children were visible beyond disguise. "Don't let him," said Anthea to the lady, and she spoke with intense earnestness; "he's not fit to go with anyone!" "Go away, little girl!" said St. Maur (as we will now call him) in a terrible voice. "Go home at once!" "You'd much better not have anything to do with him," the now reckless Anthea went on. "He doesn't know who he is. He's something very different from what you think he is." "What do you mean?" asked the lady, not unnaturally, while Devereux (as I must term the grown-up Lamb) tried vainly to push Anthea away. The others backed her up, and she stood solid as a rock. "You just let him go with you," said Anthea, "you'll soon see what I mean! How would you like to suddenly see a poor little helpless baby spinning along downhill beside you with its feet up on a bicycle it had lost control of?" The lady had turned rather pale.