"Smells! good gracious, of what?" asks Julia. "_Bones!_" says Mr. Browne, mysteriously. "_Dead_ bones!" "What sort of bones?" asks Portia, starting into life, and really growing a little pale, even beneath the crimson glare of the pine logs. "Human bones!" says Dicky, growing more gloomy as he says this, and marks with rapture the impression it makes upon his audience. "It reminds one of graves, and sarcophaguses, and cemeteries, and horrid things that rustle in coffin cloths, and mop and mow in corners. But if you will come, I will make you all heartily welcome." "Thank you. No, I don't think _I'll_ come," says Julia, casting an uneasy glance behind her; the recesses of the room are but dimly lit, and appear ghostlike, highly suggestive of things uncanny from where she sits. "Dicky," pathetically, not to say affrightedly, "you have told us plenty about your horrid old house; don't tell us any more." "There isn't any more to tell," says Dicky, who is quite content with his success so far. "You haven't yet told us where you were all day," says Portia, lowering her fan to look at him. "In the village for the most part--I dote on the village--interviewing the school and the children. Mr. Redmond got hold of me, and took me in to see the infants. It was your class I saw, I think, Dulce; it was so uncommonly badly behaved." Dulce, in her dark corner, gives no sign that she has heard this gracious speech. "I don't think much of your schoolmaster either," goes on Mr. Browne, unabashed. "His French, I should say, is not his strong point. Perhaps he speaks it 'after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe,' for certainly 'Frenche of Paris, is to him unknowe?'" "I shouldn't think one would look for foreign languages from a village schoolmaster," says Sir Mark, lazily. "I _didn't_ look for it, my good fellow, he absolutely showered it upon me; and in the oddest fashion. I confess I didn't understand him. He has evidently a trick of coloring his conversation with fine words--a trick beyond me." "What did he say to you, Dicky?" asks Julia, whose curiosity is excited. "He told me a story," says Mr. Browne; "I'll tell it again to you now, if you like, but I don't suppose you _will_ like, because, as I said before, I don't understand it myself. It was hardly a story either, it was more a diatribe about his assistant." "Peter Greene?" "Ye--es. This objectionable young man's name was Peter, though, if the the schoolmaster is to be believed, he isn't _green_. 'Sir,' said he to me, 'that Peter is a bad lot--no worse. He can teach the Latin, and the Greek, and the astronomy, fust-class; but as for probity or truth, or honest dealin's of any sort, he is _au revoir_!' What on earth did he mean?" says Mr. Browne, turning a face, bright with innocence, upon the group that surrounds the fire.