“If there’s a sulphur tablet left I could eat one myself,” said Lucille.  “They are good for the inside and I have wept mine sore.”

“Too late,” answered Dam.  “Pinch some more.”

“They were the last,” was the sad rejoinder.  “They were for Rover’s coat, I think.  Perhaps they will make your coat hairy, Dam.  I mean your skin.”

“Whiskers to-morrow,” said Dam.

After a pregnant silence the young lady announced:—­

“Wish I could hug and kiss you, Darling.  Don’t you?...  I’ll write a kiss on a piece of paper and push it under the door to you.  Better than spitting it through the key-hole.”

“Put it on a piece of ham,—­more sense,” answered Dam.

The quarter-inch rasher that, later, made its difficult entry, pulled fore and pushed aft, was probably the only one in the whole history of Ham that was the medium of a kiss—­located and indicated by means of a copying-ink pencil and a little saliva.

Before being sent away to school at Wellingborough Dam had a very curious illness, one which greatly puzzled Dr. Jones of Monksmead village, annoyed Miss Smellie, offended Grumper, and worried Lucille.

Sitting in solitary grandeur at his lunch one Sabbath, sipping his old Chambertin, Grumper was vexed and scandalized by a series of blood-curdling shrieks from the floor above his breakfast-room.  Butterson, dispatched in haste to see “who the Devil was being killed in that noisy fashion,” returned to state deferentially as how Master Damocles was in a sort of heppipletic fit, and foaming at the mouth.  They had found him in the General’s study where he had been reading a book, apparently; a big Natural History book.

A groom was galloping for Dr. Jones and Mrs. Pont was doin’ her possible.

No.  Nothing appeared to have hurt or frightened the young gentleman—­but he was distinctly ’eard to shout:  “It is under my foot.  It is moving—­moving—­moving out....” before he became unconscious.

No, Sir.  Absolutely nothing under the young gentleman’s foot.

Dr. Jones could shed no light and General Sir Gerald Seymour Stukeley hoped to God that the boy was not going to grow up a wretched epileptic.  Miss Smellie appeared to think the seizure a judgment upon an impudent and deceitful boy who stole into his elders’ rooms in their absence and looked at their books.

Lucille was troubled in soul for, to her, Damocles confessed the ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward.  He said that he had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him.  He lived in subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence—­nay even in that of its counterfeit presentment—­he was a gibbering, lunatic coward.  Such, at least, was her dimly realized conception resultant upon the boy’s bald, stammering confession.