“’Oo’s very kind,” he said again, to soften his refusal. “’Oo’s very kind,” repeated Boo sarcastically, with a little grin and a mocking curtsey, “and Jack’s a great big goose. Ta-ta!” She pulled her brother away, being afraid of the arrival of governess, nurse, or somebody who might yet again snatch the gold box away from her. “Why didn’t ’oo take the money, Jack?” she said, as they ran hand-in-hand down the path. “I don’t know,” said Jack truthfully. “Somethin’ inside me told me not.” Their forsaken admirer looked after them wistfully. “Fine feathers don’t make a fine bird o’ me,” she thought sorrowfully. “Even those babies see I ain’t a lady. I always told William as how it wouldn’t be no use. I dare say in time they’ll come to us for sake of what they’ll get, but they won’t never think us aught except the rinsins of the biler.” Lord Kenilworth had been looking idly out of a window of the hotel across the evergreens after his breakfast of brandy and seltzer and had seen the little scene in the garden and chuckled as he saw. “Shrewd little beggars, gettin’ things out of the fat old woman,” he thought with approval. “How like they look to their mother; and what a blessing it is there’s never any doubts as to the _maternity_ of anybody!” He, although not a student of ‘Burke’ like Mrs. Massarene, had opened that majestic volume once on a rainy day in the library of a country house, and had looked at his own family record in it, and had seen, underneath his own title and his father’s, the names of four little children:-- Sons: (1) John Cecil Victor, Lord Kersterholme. (2) Gerald George. (3) Francis Lionel Desmond Edward. Daughter: Beatrix Cicely. “Dear little duckies!” he had murmured, biting a cigarette. “Sweet little babes! Precious little poppets! Damn ’em the whole blooming lot!” But he had been quite alone when he had said this: for a man who drank so much as he did he was always remarkably discreet. What he drank did not make him garrulous; it made him suspicious and mute. No one had ever known him allow a word to escape his lips which he would, being sober, have regretted to have said. How many abstemious persons amongst us can boast as much? CHAPTER II. It was four o’clock on a misty and dark afternoon of the month of March in London. The reception-rooms of a fine house facing Grosvenor Gate were all lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. They were rooms of unusually admirable proportions and size for the city in which they were situated, and were decorated and filled with all that modern resources, both in art and in wealth, can obtain.