It was when they'd done the hand up with scraped potato and salad oil--a great, big, fat, wet plaster of it--that I said to him: 'I don't care if you don't like games. Let's be pals.' And he said, 'I do like games, but I couldn't care about anything with mother so ill. I know you'll think I'm a muff, but I'm not really, only I do love her so.' And with that he began to cry, and I thumped him on the back, and told him exactly what a beast I knew I was, to comfort him. When Aunt Ellie was well again we kept Christmas on the 6th of January, which used to be Christmas Day in middle-aged times. Father came home before New Year, and he had a silver medal made, with a flame on one side, and on the other Sidney's name, and 'For Bravery.' If I had not been tied up in fire-guards and tea-trays perhaps I should have thought of the rug and got the medal. But I do not grudge it to Sidney. He deserved it. And he is not a muff. I see now that a person might very well be frightened at finding Indians in the hall of a strange house, especially if the person had just come from the kind of India where the Indians are quite a different sort, and much milder, with no feathers and wigwams and war-dances, but only dusky features and University Degrees. X THE AUNT AND AMABEL It is not pleasant to be a fish out of water. To be a cat in water is not what any one would desire. To be in a temper is uncomfortable. And no one can fully taste the joys of life if he is in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. But by far the most uncomfortable thing to be in is disgrace, sometimes amusingly called Coventry by the people who are not in it. We have all been there. It is a place where the heart sinks and aches, where familiar faces are clouded and changed, where any remark that one may tremblingly make is received with stony silence or with the assurance that nobody wants to talk to such a naughty child. If you are only in disgrace, and not in solitary confinement, you will creep about a house that is like the one you have had such jolly times in, and yet as unlike it as a bad dream is to a June morning. You will long to speak to people, and be afraid to speak. You will wonder whether there is anything you can do that will change things at all. You have said you are sorry, and that has changed nothing. You will wonder whether you are to stay for ever in this desolate place, outside all hope and love and fun and happiness. And though it has happened before, and has always, in the end, come to an end, you can never be quite sure that this time it is not going to last for ever. 'It _is_ going to last for ever,' said Amabel, who was eight. 'What shall I do? Oh whatever shall I do?'