“Wonder what he’ll be like? I say, isn’t it rubbish us being stuck up here like this!” “Let’s send a round-robin to granny to ask her to let’s come down,” suggested Lord Gawdor. “You don’t know granny!” replied Doris, subsiding into the book she was reading. They were still prisoners confined to the upper part of the house, and they would have to remain prisoners till the next morning, for their grandmother was an old lady who never went back on her word. At this moment a knock came to the door, and Patsy entered with a coal-scuttle full of coal. Patsy, as a rule was a bright-looking boy, enough, but this afternoon his face was very lugubrious and his hair looked tousled. It was always like that when anything, to use his own expression, “addled” him; no brushing would keep it down, it stuck out in all directions. Patsy’s hair was a sort of weather-glass from which you could tell the state of his mind; when angry or fighting it seemed to bristle just as the back of a wire-haired terrier bristles; when he was “addled” it stuck out “every which way” as Mrs Kinsella once said. “Hullo, Patsy!” cried Lord Gawdor. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go and brush your hair?” “Bob!” said Doris, “don’t be personal.” “Patsy don’t matter,” replied Lord Gawdor. “Sure, Mrs Kinsella has been brushin’ at it for an hour, Misther Robert,” said Patsy, putting his coal box down. “‘What ails you?’ says she, ‘for it’s more like a broom than a page-boy you are this mornin’,’ says she. ‘Sure, it’s addled I am,’ says I.” “What has addled you, Patsy?” asked Doris. “Dhrames, Miss Doris.” “What were the dreams, Patsy?” “I dhreamt I let robbers into the house through the bedroom windy,” replied Patsy in a faltering voice. “Miss Doris, what would they be afther doin’ to me if I did a thing like that?” “They would hang you, Patsy,” replied Doris in a cheerful voice. “Ohone!” cried the unfortunate Patsy, as if he were addressing some third person, “listen to that?—sure, it’s hanged I’d be. Miss Doris!” “Yes, Patsy?” “If I was goin’ about wid me legs where me arums ought to be, and me face twisted back to front, and me nose turned into a pig’s snout—for I dhreamt I was like that in me dhrame—what would I do for a livin’ at all, at all?” “I don’t know,” said Doris, trying to conjure up an occupation for a person so peculiarly situated and failing. “But you aren’t going to be like that, so don’t think about it.” “Miss Doris,” said Patsy, who listened to this advice without relaxing in the least the lugubrious expression on his face, “whin’s the ould lady all covered wid jewels comin’?” “Which old lady? What on earth do you mean, Patsy?” “Ould Lady Molyneux,” replied Patsy; “I’ve heard tell she’s all stuck over wid jewels like the plums on a puddin’!” “She’s coming to-morrow, I believe,” said Doris. “And you are not to speak in that disrespectful way of a lady!”