Sullenly, Bunny rose to his feet: “All right, I’ll clear it all up,” he said, hoping she would think he had used her possessions in wanton and destructive mischief, and not as it had really been, because for the past seven years he had been groping for his bricks.... “Is this your brother? I seem to remember him much bigger and fairer,” said the lady with whom Nina had just been spending the week-end, and who had accompanied her home. Mrs. Tom Fraser had been pretty once, but her tendency to fat had concentrated in the neighbourhood of her chins, so that her round little features looked as though they had been pushed upwards into a space much too small for them. “You’re thinking of Hal,” said Nina, in a tone to correspond. “I’m sorry about this mess, Lill; come down into the drawing-room and see Aunt Lavvy--and I’ll speak to you later, young man!” Nina was very brightly flushed with the effort to keep her temper, and not betray the presence of the toad to Mrs. Fraser, who was short-sighted. She had quite a fondness for toads herself, but Lill would certainly have screamed. Down in the drawing-room, she was soothed to find Aunt Lavvy and Hal, tempered by the less satisfactory presence of Miss Roberts and Ursula doing mathematics, and Lottie still practising with the metronome. “Miss Roberts, do you think we might be very kind to Lottie, and give her ten minutes holiday?” asked Aunt Lavvy pleasantly, as soon as she grasped the identity of Mrs. Fraser. “Mother,” Nina mentally worked out the usual table of contrasts, “would have apologized twenty times for the drawing-room being used as a schoolroom just today; and then she’d have explained all about Minnie not clearing the breakfast-table, and Gracie’s babies in the schoolroom, but Stanley hoped soon to find the house he wanted--and if she had known Lill was coming, etc.--all without stopping Lottie.” That nicely-behaved child, in the meantime, had drawn a chair for Mrs. Fraser close up to Aunt Lavvy’s, and had brought her a footstool and a cushion, with the solicitude for old age which she bestowed upon every one over thirty. Then she trotted out of the room, realizing that one less of a crowd was desirable when visitors were present. If it had been afternoon, she would have left a message in the kitchen that there was one extra for tea. As it was, her period of urgent usefulness at an end, she drifted into Nina’s room to see if The Cup needed polishing; and was there ardently welcomed by Bunny, toiling to drag the sheets back to their former neatness over the bed. “Here--catch hold!” “Oh, Bunny, are you in a scrape _again_?”