“Darling mother,” he was saying, “I really was frightened as to whether you would mind.  I couldn’t help remembering how you received Mr. Taynton’s proposal that you should go for a drive in his car.  Don’t you remember, Mr. Taynton?  Mother’s nose did go in the air.  It’s no use denying it.  So I thought, perhaps, that she wouldn’t like my having one.  But I wanted it so dreadfully, and so I bought it without telling her, and drove down in it to-day, which is my birthday, so that she couldn’t be too severe.”

Mr. Taynton, while Morris was speaking, had picked up the nutcrackers the boy had been using, and was gravely exploding the shells of the nuts he had helped himself to.  So Morris cracked the next one with a loud bang between his white even teeth.

“Dear Morris,” said his mother, “how foolish of you.  Give Mr. Morris another nutcracker,” she added to the parlour-maid.

“What’s foolish?” asked he, cracking another.

“Oh Morris, your teeth,” she said.  “Do wait a moment.  Yes, that’s right.  And how can you say that my nose went in the air?  I’m sure Mr. Taynton will agree with me that that is really libellous.  And as for your being afraid to tell me you had bought a motor-car yourself, why, that is sillier than cracking nuts with your teeth.”

Mr. Taynton laughed a comfortable middle-aged laugh.

“Don’t put the responsibility on me, Mrs. Assheton,” he said.  “As long as Morris’s bank doesn’t tell us that his account is overdrawn, he can do what he pleases.  But if we are told that, then down comes the cartloads of bricks.”

“Oh, you are a brick all right, Mr. Taynton,” said the boy.  “I could stand a cartload of you.”

Mr. Taynton, like his laugh, was comfortable and middle-aged.  Solicitors are supposed to be sharp-faced and fox-like, but his face was well-furnished and comely, and his rather bald head beamed with benevolence and dinner.

“My dear boy,” he said, “and it is your birthday—­I cannot honour either you or this wonderful port more properly than by drinking your health in it.”

He began and finished his glass to the health he had so neatly proposed, and Morris laughed.

“Thank you very much,” he said.  “Mother, do send the port round.  What an inhospitable woman!”

Mrs. Assheton rose.

“I will leave you to be more hospitable than me, then, dear,” she said.

“Shall we go, Madge?  Indeed, I am afraid you must, if you are to catch the train to Falmer.”

Madge Templeton got up with her hostess, and the two men rose too.  She had been sitting next Morris, and the boy looked at her eagerly.

“It’s too bad, your having to go,” he said.  “But do you think I may come over to-morrow, in the afternoon some time, and see you and Lady Templeton?”

Madge paused a moment.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “but we shall be away all day.  We shan’t be back till quite late.”