"If, Madame," he is reported to have said, "I am to understand that you cannot keep discipline without having resort to methods more suitable to a boy of eight than to a young lady of eighteen, it is time that I undertook the responsibility myself! Cecilia, go up to your room. I will settle with Madame. And by the time that is done--the--ah--baggage-cart will be at the door--as sure as my name is G-rrrrrumph--G-rrrumph--G-rrrummph!" And, indeed, the "baggage-cart" (in the shape of a small omnibus) was at the door. Although really, you know, the Colonel's name was not as he himself affirmed. "And now, Missy," growled the Colonel in his finest Full-Bench-of-Justices manner, "kindly tell me what you have been doing!" For, very characteristically, the Colonel, though entirely declining to listen to a word of accusation against his daughter from Madame Rolly, reserved to himself the right of distributing an even-handed justice afterwards. His method on such occasions is just the reverse of father's, as we have all learned to our cost. Our father would have listened gravely to all that Madame had to recount of our misdeeds. Then he would have nodded, remarked, "You did perfectly right, Madame! In anything that you may propose, I will support you--so long, that is, as I judge it best that my child shall remain at your school!" For father's first principle in all such matters is, "Support authority--receive or make no complaints--and, above all, work out your own salvation, my young friend!" And though it sometimes looks a bit hard at the time, as Hugh John says, "It prepares a fellow for taking his own part in the world, as you soon find you have jolly well to do if you mean to get on." But Cissy knew her father, and promptly set herself to cry as heartbrokenly as she could manage on such short notice. Colonel Davenant Carter gazed at her a moment with a haughty and defiant expression. But as Toady Lion had once said of him, "I teached him to come the High Horsicle wif ME!" So now, as the rickety omnibus jogged and swayed over the Parisian cobbles, Cissy wept ever more bitterly, till the old soldier had to entreat her to stop. They would, so it appeared, soon be at his hotel. Even now they were passing his club, and "that old gossiping beast, Repton Reeves," was at the window. If it got about that he, Colonel Davenant Carter, had been seen driving down the Rue de Rivoli with a damsel drowned in floods of tears--why, by all the bugles of Balaclava, he would never hear the end of it. He might as well resign at the club. All which, as Cissy sobbed out in the French language, was "exceedingly equal" to her! But it was very far indeed from being "egal" to the peppery Colonel. And at last, as the sobs increased in carry and volume, he was reduced to the ignominious expedient of personal bribery.