"No, I don't. Miss Devereux will have done the business by then. I wouldn't say so much to most people, Mabel: but it's just the old story over again—the hen with one chick, you know. And an old maid hen is the worst of all, don't you see?" "Only he's such a nice boy!" regretfully. "He's lovely!" said Mrs. Kennedy. "A real out-and-out gentleman, and the prettiest manners! Too pretty by half for a boy of seventeen! Why, he ought to be a hobbledehoy, and there isn't a scrap of hobbledehoyism about him. It isn't natural. It's like a tadpole growing into a frog, without dropping its tail, you know. And it's ruination to any boy to be treated as if he was a spoonful of salt, ready to melt. That's what she does, don't you see?" "But at school—" "Oh, well, yes, there's school. Of course there's school. It's a good school too, from all one hears. Capital masters, and all that; and a hundred and twenty boys isn't bad. I'd sooner have him at a regular public school: but this is next best. Only, the moment Cyril comes home, all the good's undone. Mustn't get his feet wet, don't you know? Dear me, if my boys were coddled like that, there'd be a rebellion, I do believe. They wouldn't stand it, not even from their mother. But Cyril's been brought up to like a fuss." "He had one bad attack on his chest." "Three years ago! I wouldn't wrap a boy up in flannel and cotton-wool all the rest of his days, just for that. I'll tell you what, Mabel—you get your father to interfere. A doctor always can step in. Everybody expects good advice from a doctor." "Not unasked advice," Mabel said, smiling. She was a nice ladylike girl of about nineteen, the eldest of Dr. Ingram's three daughters. "Oh, as for advice—Miss Devereux is like other people. She doesn't ask for advice, except when she wants to be told that she's in the right. That's the way, don't you know? Why, she wouldn't have sent him to school at all to this very day, I do believe, if General Villiers and his wife hadn't made a rumpus." "Still—five years and a half of schooling ought to have done something for him," Mabel remarked. This was Mrs. Kennedy's "At Home" afternoon; and she was seated in the small drawing-room of St. John's Vicarage, expecting callers. Friday had been from time immemorial—in other words, so long as she had lived at Dutton—her "At Home" day. Not that she dignified it by any such important title: "I am generally in, you know, on Friday afternoons," was her fashion of asking friends to call at that time. She had a free-and-easy manner of speaking. The County people did not care for Mrs. Kennedy; not that they objected to a touch of originality, but they were not satisfied as to her connections. "To talk of one's 'At Home day' sounds so fussy, don't you know," she often said. "Not fit for such little people as we, my dear! If it was the Canon, now!" For the mother-church of Dutton was held by Canon Meyers.