“That’s a very good answer, Mar,” said John. “Life’s whatever you have to do with in the condition you are in. And I can tell you that to make such a speech when you’re suddenly called upon is one of the things---- I can tell you this. It makes my heart sink down into my boots. I’d rather meet a mad dog any day----” “It’s not so hard, Uncle John,” said Mar, unable altogether to suppress the instinctive desire of youth to instruct its elders, “when you have no time to think at all, but must just carry on.” John shook his head. “When you have to tell them you can’t take off ten per cent. off their rent--it’s not so easy,” he said. “They don’t sing ‘He’s a jolly good fellow,’ then.” “It wasn’t Mar that was the jolly good fellow, it was Duke,” said Tiny. “It was both of them,” cried Jack from across the table. “I started it myself,” cried Reggie; “I know who I meant.” “It was Duke,” said Miss Hill, to the great astonishment of the young ones. “It is not a thing I would ever sing--but I started it too. And Duke, if I ever was unkind to you--” “You--unkind!” cried the young man with his laughing voice, in which the tears he was ashamed of were half audible. “But look here. I thought of what you said, Aunt Agnes. Now, father, listen, that boy’s not to be Mar any longer. He’s to be Frogmore.” “Oh, Froggy--that is what I shall call him,” said the little girl. “What are you all saying?” cried Letty, who was making conversation for the vicar at the other end of the table, but who could bear it no longer. “Oh, what are you saying? You are keeping all the fun to yourselves, and I can’t hear a word you say.” The boys began to sing, drowning her voice--the two schoolboys who had lost their heads altogether. Reggie “started” again, as he said, the chorus of the rest; but as Jack began a different performance altogether to the strain of ‘Froggy he would a wooing go,’ the two tunes clashed for a moment, until attracted by the superior appropriateness of the new ditty Reggie abandoned his first inspiration and chimed in, while Duke rising up cried, “We’ll drink his health again, and christen him for the family, Frogmore!” That moment, however, an electric shock ran down the table, the song died off into silence. Letitia rose from her place pale with wrath. “How can you permit such a Babel,” she cried. “I am ashamed of you, John. If it goes on another moment I shall have to leave the room: let me hear no more of this nonsense and childish folly here.” CHAPTER XXXV.