"You can’t see a thing in her house," he said sadly. "There’s white curtains with frills downstairs and a straight thing right across the windows upstairs, and a looking-glass in one window shows just above the straight thing. You’ve got that, you know, for shaving; we might put ours there too; it would fill up a bit. It’s against the wall just now because we liked to see out." "Oh! they’d just peek round it," said Edmund. "We’d best nail a sheet across for to-night." "But won’t that look funny from outside?" Montagu objected. "Not half so funny as us skipping about with nothing on," Edmund retorted. Mr. Wycherly sat, his elbows on the table, his head in his hands: "Boys, boys, it is appalling that at the very outset we should have scandalised a neighbour and made ourselves a nuisance." "Not a nuisance, Guardie," Edmund remonstrated; "she must have _liked_ to watch us or she wouldn’t have done it. If Mrs. Thingummy had kept behind her own curtains she couldn’t have seen us so plain." Here Mrs. Griffin tapped at the door again, opened it about three inches, and called through: "A lady to see you, sir." "That’ll be your one come to complain," Edmund whispered to his distracted guardian. "Am I interrupting you? May I come in?" asked an exceedingly pleasant voice which was followed by a kind-looking, pretty young lady, who was rather surprised at her reception. What she saw was a handsome, white-haired old gentleman seated at a table with his back to the light. Ranged on either side of him were two boys who regarded her with looks of dark suspicion, and on the faces of all three dismay and consternation were writ large, while Edmund’s face was both tear-stained and exceedingly dirty. Mr. Wycherly rose hastily as she came in. Pretty Mrs. Methuen, wife of one of the youngest dons in Oxford, was quite unused to manifestations other than those of pleasure at her approach, and she stopped abruptly just inside the door to remark rather incoherently: "Perhaps it is too soon; it may be inconvenient, but my husband asked me to call directly you arrived to see if I could be of any use.... He is still fishing in Hampshire, and as I passed I saw that you were here." Mr. Wycherly let go of the table, which he had seized nervously, and advanced to shake her outstretched hand. Montagu pulled out a chair for her. "Pray be seated," said Mr. Wycherly. "It is most kind of you to call.... These are my wards." The lady took the proffered chair and shook hands with the boys, who still looked dubious, although Edmund was distinctly attracted. On Mr. Wycherly’s gentle, scholarly face bewilderment struggled to break through the mask of polite interest through which he regarded his visitor. "You’ve only just come, haven’t you?" she asked. "We’ve been living in the house for three days, but we are far from being properly established; our servant has not arrived yet...." "And we keep on finding out things we haven’t got," Edmund interpolated.