“Nancy!” says Sir Roger, his eyes following the Brat, who is lightly tripping up the stone steps, looking very small and agile in his white-flannel cricketing things, “what is that boy’s real name?  Why do you call him ‘the Brat?’”

“Because he is such a Brat,” reply I, fondly, picking up from the grass a green chestnut-bud that the squirrels or the rooks have untimely nipped.  “Did you ever see any thing so little, so white and pert?  He has sadly mistaken his vocation in life:  he ought to have been a street Arab.”

“One gets rather sick of one’s surname,” says my companion.  “Except your father, hardly any one calls me Roger now!  I should be glad to answer to it again.”

He turns and looks at me with a kind of appeal as he says this.  If he were not forty-seven and a man, I should say that he was coloring a little.  After all, blushing is confined to no age.  I have seen a veteran of sixty-five redden violently.

“Do you mean to say,” cry I, looking rather aghast, and speaking, as usual, without thinking, “that you mean me to call you Roger! indeed, I could not think of such a thing! it would sound so—­so disrespectful!  I should as soon think of calling my father James.”

“Should you?” he answers, turning away his face toward the garden-beds, where the blue forget-me-not is unrolling her sky-colored sheet, and the double daisies are stiffly parading their tight pink buttons.  “Then call me what you like!”

I am not learned in the variations of his voice, as I am in those of father and Algy, in either of which I can at once detect each fine inflection of anger, contest, or pain; but, comparatively unversed as I am in it, there sounds to me a slight, carefully smothered, yet still perceptible, intonation of disappointment—­mortification.  I wish that the air would give me back my words; but that it never yet was known to do.

“I will try if you like,” say I, cheerfully, but a little shyly, as, like the March Hare and the Hatter in the “Mad Sea Party,” I move up past the empty chairs to the one next him.  “I do not see, after all, why I should not get quite used to it in time!  Roger!  Roger! it is a name I have always been very partial to until” (laughing a little) “the Claimant threw discredit on all Rogers!”

He is looking at me again.  After all, I must have been mistaken.  There is no shadow of disappointment or mortification near him.  He is smiling with some friendliness.

“You must never mind what I say,” I continue, dragging my wicker chair along the shortly-shorn sward a little nearer to him."Never! nobody ever does; I am a proverb and a by-word for my malapropos speeches.  Mother always trembles when she hears me talking to a stranger.  The first day that I dined after you came, Algy made me a list of things that I was not to talk about to you.”

“A list of sore subjects?” says my lover, laughing.  “But how did the boy know what were my sore subjects?  What were they, Nancy?”