Percival was eagerly awaiting the excitement of seeing the cart come into view around the bend whence it sounded. But he stretched up his hands to fondle her face. "Well, I believe you would, you know," he declared. "Of course they'd have shouted, but suppose the horse was bobbery and wouldn't stop?" Aunt Maggie feigned alarm at this dreadful possibility. "Oh, but you're all right with me," Percival reassured her. He had a quaint habit of using phrases of hers. "I keep an eye on you, you know, even when I'm far behind." She laughed and looked at him proudly; and she had reason for her pride. At seven--rising eight--Percival had fairly won through the vicissitudes of a motherless infancy. He had come through a lusty babyhood and was sprung into an alert and beautiful childhood, dowered of his father's strong loins, of his mother's gentle fairness, that caused heads to turn after him as he raced about the village street. Heads turned from the cart that now approached and passed. It proved to be a wagonette. Two women and a man sat among the many packages behind. On the box-seat, next the driver, was a lanky youth, peculiarly white and unhealthy of visage. Percival stared at him. In envy perhaps of the sturdy and glowing health of the starer, the lanky youth scowled back, and lowering his jaw pulled a grimace with an ease and repulsiveness that argued some practice. Turning in his seat, he allowed Percival to appreciate the distortion to the full. This was that same Egbert Hunt, whose power of grimace opened, as it continues, our history. Percival directed an interested face to Aunt Maggie. "Is that a clown sitting up there?" he asked her. He had accompanied Aunt Maggie into Great Letham on the previous day, and had been much engaged by the chalked countenance of a clown, grinning from posters of a coming circus. Aunt Maggie answered him with her thoughts: "I think they must be going to the Manor, dear. I expect they are Lord Burdon's servants." "Well, I'm sure he was a clown," Percival answered. But a few paces farther up the road, stepping into it from a footpath over the fields, a little old gentleman was met, whom Aunt Maggie greeted as Mr. Amber, and who verified her opinion. "The family is coming down the day after to-morrow," Mr. Amber said, "as I was telling you last week. Servants are to arrive to-day. I think I saw them in the wagonette as I came down the path. And how are you, Master Percival? I hope you are very well." Percival put his small hand into the extended palm. "I'm very well, Mr. Amber, thank you. One of them was a clown, you know. He made a face at me--like this." "God bless my soul, did he indeed?" Mr. Amber exclaimed. "Yes, he did," said Percival. "Just make it back again to me, will you please, so I can see if I showed you properly?" But Mr. Amber declined the experiment. "The wind might change while I was doing it," he said, "and then I should be like that always."