"Poor Jimmy," Nell said as she passed him sitting innocently gazing before him, "I wonder if you’re getting used to earthquakes and tornadoes that seize up your house and hurl it into darkness behind the sofa! Aunt Kezia never used to come up here as she does now!" Molly shouted out, "Oh!" and a crash drowned her voice. In trying to fix some holly in a pot on a shelf, she had knocked the shelf down, and with it a collection of pots, curious stones, photographs, pigs. Nell prognosticated, "Now Ted Lancaster will come," and dived under the table after a curious old fossil she had found one day in the little stream at the foot of Belmarknock Hill. She picked it up, and sat back on her heels, lost in a sudden dream of that misty day when she had found it. The dear mist! She remembered what a vivid emerald green the grass had been—and the golden shafts of sunlight that fell athwart the mist—and the deep blue sky behind it. She remembered how clearly the reflection of herself and her red tam-o’-shanter had shown in the stream—and down the hill Denis’s voice, singing and shouting to his dogs, had come to her.... Ted Lancaster stood within the doorway and looked round the room with bewildered eyes. Emerging from the lounge were a pair of long legs and a bit of skirt. Up on a step-ladder, in the corner, he discerned the Atom. From beneath the table trailed a piece of bright blue pinafore; that was all. "I’ve told the handmaiden to hurry up with tea," came Denis’s voice behind him. The legs beneath the lounge wriggled spasmodically, and out came Molly, red and abashed. From the step-ladder descended the Atom, but Nell sat on, serene and absorbed, beneath the table. "Where’s Nell?" shouted Denis. "I say, bet you knocked that shelf down, old muddle-head! What ever’s Nell sitting under the table for?" Brought to the present, she crawled out. "How-do-you-do?" she said in an absent sort of voice. Ted looked at her. Her eyes were soft and looking far away; she quite forgot to remember how queer he must have thought it to find her sitting under the table. The suddenness of the change from the stream with its music in her ears, and the hills and the mist before her eyes, to the Stronghold was harsh, and made her feel bad. From her face he glanced to the queer old fossil to which her fingers were clinging with something of desperation in their hold, and he understood suddenly. He turned his broad shoulders on her. "What were you doing under that lounge, Miss Molly? And you, Miss Sheila Patricia Kathleen O’Brien—surely you should not have been at the top of those steps?" Sheila Pat’s great eyes fairly glowered at him. "Sure, thin, I was never dhramin’ you were a—a spoilsport! Go away! It’s easy to see now that you’ve never been in Ireland!" "I’ve forbidden those steps to her," declared Denis, striving to look severe. "Let’s take them out, old man." "I—I wish you wouldn’t call me ’Miss Molly’!" blurted out Molly, suddenly.