Dicky has only just arrived. He has been absent all day, and is now being questioned--desired to give an account of himself and his time ever since breakfast-time. "It is something new to be asked where I have been," says Mr. Browne, who also thinks it will be as new as it is nice for him to take the aggrieved tone and go in heavily on the ill-used tack. "Never mind that," says Julia; "tell us only--where _have_ you been?" "Well, really, I hardly quite know," says Dicky, delightfully vague as usual. "Round about the place, don't you know." "But you must remember where?" "As a rule," says Mr. Browne, meditatively, "I come and go, and no account is taken of my wanderings. To-night all is different, now I am put under a cross-examination that reduces me to despair. This is unfair, it is cruel. If you would always act thus it would be gratifying, but to get up an interest in me on rare occasions such as the present, is, to say the least of it, embarrassing. I am half an orphan, some of you might be a father to me sometimes." "So we will, Dicky, in a body," says Mark Gore, cheerfully. "I like that," says Portia, laughing. "Instead of looking after _you_, Dicky, I rather think we want some one to look after _us_." "Well, I'll do that with pleasure," says Mr. Browne. "It is my highest ambition. To be allowed to look after you has been the dream of my life for months: "'Thy elder brother I would be, Thy _father_, _anything_ to thee!'" "By-the-by, Dicky, where is your father now?" asks Stephen Gower, who is leaning against the mantelpiece in Dulce's vicinity, but not quite close to her. Ill-temper, called dignity, forbids his nearer approach to his goddess. "Down South," says Dicky. "_Not_ in Carolina, exactly, but in Devon. It _does_ remind one of the ten little nigger boys, doesn't it?" Then he begins with a quite uncalled for amount of energy, "'Eight little nigger boys traveling in Devon, one overslept hisself, and then there were seven,'" and would probably have continued the dismal ditty up to the bitter end, but that Sir Mark calls him up sharp. "Never mind the niggers," he says, "tell us about your father. Where is he now?" "Down at the old place, cursing his fate, no doubt. By-the-bye, talking of my ancestral home, I wish some day you would all come and put in a month there. Will you?" "We will," says Julia, directly. Julia is always ready to go anywhere, children and all, at a moment's notice. "Is it a nice place, Dicky?" asks Sir Mark, cautiously. "No, it isn't," says Mr. Browne; "not _now_, you know. I hear it used to be; but there's no believing old people, they lie like fun. I'll get it settled up for all of you, if you'll promise to come, but just at present it isn't much. It is an odd old place, all doors and dust, and rats, I shouldn't wonder." "That's nothing," says Gower. "Anything else against it?" "Well, I don't know," replies Dicky, gloomily. "It _smells_, I think."