'It is a little boy I borrowed to keep me company while you were all away,' said Mrs. Gilmour, running her hands through Kitty's hair. 'What a queer-looking child! Looks as if he had water on the brain!' Auntie May said in a low voice, but Kitty heard. Then Auntie May took _me_ up in her arms and mumbled me, and kissed me. 'Sweetums! Didums! Who's been making a fool of you with your red socks? Poor lamb, get out of them at once. I see they worry you. Mercy, who is this?' as Rosamond bounced out at her. 'Rosamond, what an object! Have you been gardening? You _are_ filthy. Don't come near me until you are cleaned up, please. You seem all to have quite gone mad. But never mind, so long as we get a cup of hot tea. Here's Beatrice at last. Beatrice, I have ordered tea. I simply couldn't wait!' Those idiotic children rushed off to the schoolroom in a body and howled. Kitty had cut off her hair so that her own aunt did not know her, and the chances were that her own mother wouldn't either, she thought. In fact, the surprise had been a horrid failure. I could have told her that her own mother would know her fast enough if she _chose_ to, and would, moreover, punish her well for having cut off her own fur like that without waiting for the barber, who comes once a month to barber them all properly. Sure enough, there was an awful to-do, especially when they found Amerye playing sweep in her mother's nice clean bed with pink hangings. Kitty and Amerye were sent to bed without any supper except a bit of dry bread, and Rosamond, not having done anything particular to herself--trust her not to make herself ugly!--was scolded for having allowed Kitty to cut her own hair all crooked across the forehead. Only Mrs. Gilmour, the grown-up lady who had helped it all on, got off without a scolding, as they always do. I was scolded for one or two little things I had done while Auntie May was away, and especially for the packet of tapestry nails or pins, whatever you do call the horrid things that I shall never see again without a shudder and feeling myself all over. 'I tell you what, May,' said Beatrice. 'I am resigned to Loki's passing his nose over everything, reading postcards and docketing bills and superintending the post generally, but when it comes to opening my parcels for me, I do think it is too much. There were, I believe, a thousand nails in that packet he demolished. I can't fag to count them over now, but if their number is incomplete, I should say that the balance was in your cat's stomach. _He_ knows, probably.' I did _not_ know, they were such trifling, two-penny-halfpenny things that one of them might easily have stuck to my tongue in turning them over. The dread saddened my last days at Crook Hall.