Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air, she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them for?" "Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect, after all, to make my fortune." Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well, here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My idea is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a day----" "But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they run away? Ours did." While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers." CHAPTER XI AWAKENING There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go into the Bungalow. This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said, according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle eyes and very long arms and legs. Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death. "I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject. "Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it." * * * * * I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back--the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person. We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came. That pleased me more than anything.