Mrs. Cole did not wish, Aunt Amy even did not wish, to see their Herbert “a fool”; very much better for their daily life and happiness that he should not be one, and yet in a short two days that was what he was, so that Aunt Amy, without realizing it, spoke sharply to him and Mrs. Cole disagreed with him about the weather prospects. Of course the women did their best to stand up for him and defend him in his weak attempts at resistance, but, after all, Percy was a visitor and wouldn’t be here for long, and “hadn’t been home for such a time that naturally his way of looking at things couldn’t be quite ours,” and then at Sunday supper they were forced to laugh against their will, but “one was glad of _anything_ by Sunday evening to make things a little bright,” at Percy’s account of Herbert when he was a boy tumbling out of the wagonette on a picnic and nobody missing him until they got home that night. It _was_ funny as Percy told it. Poor Herbert! running after the wagonette and shouting and nobody noticing, and then losing himself and not getting home until midnight. Aunt Amy was forced to laugh until she cried, and even Mrs. Cole, regarding her husband with tender affection, said: “So like you, Herbert, dear, not to _ask_ somebody the way!” The only member of the family who did not see something funny in all of this was Jeremy. He was conscious only of his father. He was aware exactly of how he was feeling. He so thoroughly himself detested being laughed at, especially when it was two to one—and now it was about five to one! As he watched his father’s white face with the slow flushes rising and falling, the pale nervous eyes wandering in their gaze from place to place, the expression of bewilderment as Uncle Percy’s loud tones surged up to him, submerged him and then slowly withdrew, Jeremy was reminded of his own first evening at Thompson’s, when in the dormitory he had been suddenly delivered up to a wild troop of savages who knew neither law nor courtesy. As it had been with him then, so was it with his father now. Uncle Percy had all the monotony of the unimaginative. One idea was enough for him, and his idea just now was to take it out of “old Herbert.” I can only repeat that he did not mean it unkindly; he thought that he was being vastly amusing for the benefit of those poor dull women who never had any fun from one year’s end to the other. His verdict, after he had left him and gone on somewhere else, would be: “Well, I gave those poor mugs a merry week. Hard work, but one must do one’s best.” Meanwhile Jeremy watched his father. III Soon he saw his father hurrying off, book under his arm, umbrella in hand. “Where are you going, father?” “To the Greybank Schools.” “I’ll walk up with you.” “Well, hurry, then. I haven’t much time.”