‘Not so many, after all,’ interrupts Crosby, laughing. ‘Don’t magnify them like that. I’ve shot a few, I confess, but I only seem to remember seven. One does remember them when one’s face to face with them. But there is not such a lot to remember, after all.’ ‘It would serve, so far as I am concerned,’ says Wyndham frankly. ‘Indeed, I think I could do with one—always supposing he was dead. As for how I feel now, it is as though I were in a den of them, and I doubt if I’ll come as well out of it as Daniel did.’ Crosby regards him with an amused eye. ‘Apropos your tenant,’ says he, ‘when are you going to introduce your aunt to your young man?’ ‘Oh, get out!’ says Wyndham. ‘That’s a lion if you like,’ says Crosby. ‘Which—my aunt or my tenant?’ ‘I haven’t seen the tenant. Still, it strikes me that she will be a lion, too. I’d get out of that den if I were you.’ ‘Well, I want to. But what’s one to do? I can’t get rid of either of my lions.’ ‘Not even of the tenant?’ ‘I don’t see how I can, now I have given my promise.’ ‘Well, introduce them to each other; that’s a capital suggestion if you will only look into it. Whilst they claw each other, you may be able to make your escape.’ ‘Introduce them?’ Wyndham pauses, as if sounding the proposition, then gives way to wrath. ‘Hang it!’ says he; ‘you are worse than Job’s three comforters all rolled into one.’ CHAPTER XVII. ‘No hinge nor loop To hang a doubt on.’ To-day is Sunday—the first Sunday since that eventful day when Susan had tackled and disarmed the thief, and certainly the warmest day that has come this season. In here in the church the heat is almost intolerable; and Susan, when the Litany begins, feels her devotion growing faint. She has, indeed, up to this had a good deal of troublous excitement. To keep one eye on Jacky, who had left home in a distinctly resentful mood, and the other on Tommy, who doesn’t believe in churches as a satisfactory playground, is a task to which few would be equal; and even now, when Tommy has been reduced to silence by Betty and lemon-drops, the excessive warmth of the day leaves Susan too tired to follow the beautiful service. Mechanically she says, ‘We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord’; but her mind is wandering, and presently her eyes begin to wander too.