If Mr Ffolliot did not take Mrs Grantly's advice and look after things himself, he certainly was forced to attend to a good many tiresome details in the management of things outside the Manor House than had ever fallen to his lot before. Mary saved him all she could, but Willets and Heaven and Fusby seemed to take a malicious delight in consulting him about trivial things that he found himself quite unable to decide one way or other. At first he tried to put them off with "Ask Miss Mary," but Willets shook his head, smiled kindly, and said firmly, "Twouldn't be fair, sir, 'twouldn't really." Ger and the Kitten had never seemed so tiresome and ubiquitous before, coming across his path at every turn; and Ger certainly nullified any uneasiness on the Squire's part regarding his eyes by practising, in and out of season, upon a discarded bugle. A bugle bought for him by one of his friends in the Royal 'Orse for the sum of three and ninepence. Ger had amassed three shillings of this sum, and the good-natured gunner never mentioned the extra ninepence. Ger had a quick ear and could already pick out little tunes on the piano with one finger, though, so far, he had found musical notation as difficult as every other kind of reading. But he took to the bugle like a duck to water, and on an evil day someone in Woolwich had taught him the peace call, "Come to the Cookhouse Door." The inhabitants of Redmarley were summoned to the cook-house door from every part of the village, from the woods, from the riverside, and from the churchyard. He played the bugle in the nursery and in the stableyard, he played it in the attics and outside the servants' hall when the servants' dinner was ready. He was implored, threatened and punished, but all without avail, for Ger had tasted the joys of achievement. He had found what superior persons call "the expression of his essential ego," and just then his cosmos was all bugle. Not even his good-natured desire to oblige people was proof against this overwhelming desire to call imaginary troops to feed together on every possible and impossible occasion. He did try to keep a good way from the house, or to choose moments in the house when he knew his father was out, but he made mistakes. He could not discover by applying his eye to the keyhole of the study door whether his father was in the room or not, and, as he remarked bitterly, "Father always sat so beastly still" it was impossible to hear. He looked upon the Squire's objections as a cross, but the dread of his father's anger was nothing like so strong as his desire to play the bugle, and even the Squire perceived that short of taking the bugle away from him, which would have broken his heart, there was nothing for it but to frown and bear it--in moderation.