“Pardon, mademoiselle. It is the car of Doctor Lake. But at the wheel sat not monsieur the doctor. Instead, there sat, and drove”—here Lucien forgot himself completely—“that demon boy.” “Buster!” I groaned. For there was only one demon boy on all Cape Ann, and that was my second cousin Isabella O’Brien’s only son, Richard Parke O’Brien, rechristened Buster since the days of his tempestuous infancy. Isabella (born Sears and Brattle Street, but she ran away and married Octavius O’Brien, descendant of an unknown race, at eighteen, and has lived ever since in the wilds of Oklahoma)—Isabella, I say, had sent her child to visit Aunt Charlotte and myself, while she and her Octavius went camping in the Yosemite. From her letters we had inferred that she needed a vacation from her Civic League work. Later, we came to realize that her base secret aim had been to win a vacation from Buster. What we two sedate Back Bay spinsters had endured from that unspeakable child! Octavius O’Brien is a large, emphatic man with large, emphatic ideas as to the rearing of children. Buster once summarized his father’s method in a few simple words. “Here in New England, when I want to learn how to do anything, you and Aunt Charlotte say: ‘Dear me, Richard, wait till you grow up. Then you’ll understand.’ Down in Oklahoma, dad just gives me a check and says: ‘Go to it.’” Such eclecticism bears startling fruits. The maddening thing about Buster’s activities was that his blackest crimes, once sifted down, proved not to be crimes at all. Merely the by-products of his inquiring disposition. Although, to quote Aunt Charlotte, if your house is burnt down over your head, it matters little to you whether it was fired for malice or from a scientific desire to see how long it would take to burn.