"I’m thinking you make very unrespectful friends, Denis O’Brien," she remarked austerely. "That boy—" pause—"_pulled—my—pig-tail_!" *CHAPTER XV* Nell stirred energetically. "Molly! Molly!" "Yes!" "Come and stir my toffee a minute. I want to run down and look at my cakes." "Oh, miss," Sarah greeted her with a relieved and beaming smile, "I’m so glad you’ve come. I’m that afraid they’ll burn! And I darsent open the oven door, ’cause you told me not to." "Don’t they look good, Sarah?" "’Aven’t they risen splendid, miss?" Sarah looked at the little golden cakes admiringly. "You can cook beautiful! Those pitaters you showed me ’ow to do—they were beautiful." "Oh, potatoes!" She laughed. "They’re our national dish, you know. Sarah, is your mother better?" "Yes, miss, and those books did cheer ’er you wouldn’t believe, with all the beautiful pictures of the birds and animals and flowers and trees and reading about ’em; not," honestly, "that she reads all of ’em, her not being a scholard, but there’s one or two about the little birds and ’ow they builds their nests and all that that she’s just read over and over again, and she does enjoy the pictures—such a one she is for the country ever since she went to Margate for a week on ’er ’oneymoon! And she’s that careful with them, miss!" Nell nodded. "Yes she is. I’m so glad—I do hate to have books mauled about." Sarah grinned delightedly. "This is how she does, miss. She gits out ’er black-edged handkercher what she ’ad for father’s funeral and Walter’s and Gladys’s,—what died, you know,—and she puts it across the back of the book and round the edges so as her fingers don’t touch the pages at all, and she keeps the book wrapped up in that funeral handkercher, and she says to the children, ’If ever I ketch you a-touching of that handkercher, I’ll beat you till you’re black and blue from head to foot!’ So you see, miss, that’s ’ow it is." Nell, twinkling over the contrast between Mrs. Jones’s fierce words and herself, a meek little thin woman with watery blue eyes and no control over even her baby, gravely declared she did see, and then hurried up to the Stronghold again. "It really looks charming!" she said, standing on the threshold and looking round the little, overcrowded room, with its pictures, its books, its various treasures, its photographs, a good many of them in beautifully carved Irish bog-oak frames, its two bronze jars with pink chrysanthemums in them, its collection of bog-oak pigs of all sizes. Jim O’Driscoll sat thoughtfully in the large cage that Denis had made for him. He had discovered that, by stretching out his arm to its uttermost length, he could reach a cushion on the sofa; that, by wriggling in a finger, he could pull the feathers out, and he was very happy.