It had been sprung upon them all with the utmost suddenness that he was coming to pay them a visit. They had but just returned from Caerlyon and the sea—in another ten days Jeremy would be off to school again—when the telegram arrived that threw them all into such perturbation. “Arrive eleventh. Hope you can put me up for day or two—Percy.” Percy! Fortunately there was for them in the whole world only one Percy or they might have been in sad confusion, because their Percy was, they imagined, safe in the suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand. A letter followed confirming the telegram. Mr. Cole had not seen his brother for twenty years. They had received one photograph of a large fat staring man on a large fat staring horse. Such thighs, such a back, both of man and of horse! “Feed their animals well in New Zealand” was Uncle Samuel’s only comment, and he, back only that minute from painting the moors, departed at a moment’s notice for London. “Don’t you want to see Uncle Percy?” asked Jeremy. “I shall see him better if I study him from a distance,” said Uncle Samuel. “He’s too large to see properly close to,” and he went—voted selfish by all because he would not help in the entertaining. “Of course I’m selfish,” said Uncle Samuel. “No one else cares tuppence about me, so where should I be if I didn’t look after myself?” In any case their Uncle Percy actually was shut into the drawing-room, and five minutes later the children were sent for. It had not been intended that Hamlet should enter with them, but he had a way of suddenly appearing from nowhere and joining, unobtrusively, any company that he thought pleasant and amusing. To-day, however, he was anything but unobtrusive; at the sudden shock of that red flaming figure with legs spread wide across the centre of the carpet he drew himself together and barked like a mad thing. Nothing would quiet him, and when Jeremy dragged him into the passage and left him there he still barked and barked and barked, quivering all over, in a perfect frenzy of indignation and horror. He had then to be taken to Jeremy’s bedroom on the top floor and shut in, and there, too, he barked, stopping only once and again for a howl. All this disturbed Uncle Percy’s greeting of the children, but he did not seem to mind. It was obvious at once that nothing could upset him. Jeremy simply could not take his eyes off him, off his brown, almost carroty, hair that stood on end almost like an aureole, off his purple cheeks and flat red nose and thick red neck, off his flaming purple tie, his waistcoat of red and brown squares, his bulging thighs, his tartan socks. This his father’s brother, the brother of his father who sat now, the dim shadow of a shade, pale and apprehensive upon the sofa. The brother of his father! Impossible! How could it be possible?