"You're too easy-going, dad. You should make Johnny Maher mend the road." Mr. Graydon dropped a rein to pull one of his daughter's silky black curls. "You wouldn't be having me too hard on the poor fellow, and he with a sick wife and an old mother and a pack of children. Eh, little Pam?" Pamela shook her head severely, and the red mouth, which had drooped at the corners when she was serious, parted over white teeth in a laugh fresh as a child's. [Illustration: "How did the calves do wid your honour?"] "You've no conscience, dad, any more than Lord Inverbarry or Johnny Maher. You're conniving at their wrongdoing, you see." "Maybe I am, Pam--maybe I am. Only I don't suppose it seems wrongdoing to them--at least, not to Johnny Maher, poor fellow. Inverbarry ought to know better." They jogged along for a few minutes till there was another jolt. Simultaneously there was a crash at their feet, and Mr. Graydon pulled up with an exclamation. "There goes some of your crockery, Pam. I hope it's not the lad's looking-glass." "Never mind," said Pam, with a sigh of despair. "Perhaps now you'll get Johnny Maher to see to the road. If it's his looking-glass, he'll have to shave as Mick St. Leger used, with the lid of a can for his looking-glass." "Ah, poor Mick was used to our ways. He didn't mind. But this is a public-school man. We'll have to furbish up for him, little Pam, and put our best foot foremost, eh?" "It looks like it," said Pam, gazing down at the jumbled parcels at her feet. "I'll tell you what it is," she said: "it's the glass for his bedroom window. It is all in smithereens. He'll have to put up with the brown-paper panes, as Mick St. Leger did." "Never mind, never mind. The lad's a gentleman, and he'll see we're gentlefolk, though we're as poor as church mice. He won't mind, you'll see, Pam; gentlemen never do mind these things." "You're thinking of Mick still, dad. You forget that Gwynne man who wouldn't stay because he got nothing but potatoes for three days. As if we could help the roads being frozen and Frisky not being able to get to Lettergort! Do you remember Gwynne's face over the potato-cake the third day? Yet I'm sure Bridget had done her best. What with potatoes in their jackets, and mashed, and with butter, and without, and in a salad, and at last in a cake, I'm sure there was no sameness about the diet." "Gwynne was a--well, of course, he was a gentleman, but as disagreeable as a gentleman can be. Besides, Pam, potatoes probably didn't agree with him; they don't with everyone, you know, and Gwynne was dyspeptic. I don't know what the lads are coming to. In my young days we didn't even know the word dyspepsia, much less the thing." "Gwynne was hateful," said Pamela. "He expected us to kill the chickens for him when every single chicken was a pet, and so tame, dear things! that they would walk into the drawing-room and perch on your knee." "Perhaps that's why Gwynne wanted them killed," said Mr. Graydon.