A Pekinese dog never wears country clothes.  It always looks as if it had its silk hat and spats on.  If I were a country dog, who had never even smelt a Piccadilly smell, I should certainly bite all dogs of the type of Mr. Russell’s Hound.

I could hardly describe what followed as a fight.  Although I have always loved stories of giant-killers, from David downwards, and should much like to write one, I cannot in this case pretend that Mr. Russell’s Hound did anything but call for help.  Anonyma’s umbrella, Kew’s cane, and Mr. Russell’s stick did all they could towards making peace, but the big dog seemed to have set itself the unkind task of mopping up a puddle with Mr. Russell’s Hound.  The process took a considerable time.  And it was never finished, for the mistress of the house interrupted it.

She was rather a fat person, apparently possessing the gift of authority, for the sound of her call reached her dog through the noise of battle.  He saw that his aim was not one to achieve in the presence of an audience.  He disengaged his teeth from the mane of Mr. Russell’s Hound.

“Is your dog much hurt?” asked the mistress of the house, and handed Anonyma a slate.

Anonyma scanned this unexpected gift nervously.  She was much more used to taking other people aback than to being taken aback herself.  But Kew was more ready.  He dived for the pencil and wrote, “Only a bit punctured,” on the slate.

“You’d better bring it in and bathe it,” suggested the lady, when she had studied this.

They followed her in silent single file.  Anonyma noticed that her hair was apparently done in imitation of a pigeon’s nest, also that many hooks at the back of her dress had lost their grip of the situation.

The bathroom, whither Mr. Russell’s Hound was carried, was suggestive of another presence in the house.  A boat, called Golden Mary, was navigating the bath.  There were some prostrate soldiers and chessmen in a little heap on the ledge, apparently waiting for a passage.

“I’m getting out my son’s things because he is coming home,” said the lady.

Mr. Russell was bathing his bleeding Hound in the basin, and Anonyma was at the window, ostentatiously drinking in the view.  Kew took the slate and wrote politely on it:  “From school?”

“From the War,” said the lady.

Kew donned a pleased and interested expression.  It seemed to him better to do this than to write, “Really!” on the slate.

“He wrote about a fortnight ago,” the lady’s harsh voice continued, “to say he would come to-day.  He said he was sick of being grown-up, he told me to get out the soldiers and the Golden Mary.  He wants to launch them on the pond again.”

Kew nodded.  “I have felt like that,” he murmured, and the lady seemed to see the sense of his words.

“I should think you are six years older than Murray,” she said, “and very different.  Come out into the garden, and I’ll show you.”