“It’s his,” said Robin, throwing his head back and looking at his mother as he laid it with elaborate care on the table.

“My uncle’s?” said Priscilla.  “Had he lost it?  Oh thank you—­he would have been dreadfully unhappy.  Sit down.”  And she indicated with her head the chair she would allow him to sit on.

“The way she tells us to sit down!” thought Mrs. Morrison indignantly.  “As though she were a queen.”  Aloud she said, “You could have sent Joyce round with it”—­Joyce being that gardener whose baby’s perambulator was wheeled by another Ethel—­“and need not have interrupted your work.”

“So I could,” said Robin, as though much struck by the suggestion.  “But it was a pleasure,” he added to Priscilla, “to be able to return it myself.  It’s a frightful bore losing one’s umbrella—­especially if it’s an old friend.”

“Uncle Fritzi’s looks as if it were a very old friend,” said Priscilla, smiling at it.

Mrs. Morrison glanced at it too, and then glanced again.  When she glanced a third time and her glance turned into a look that lingered Robin jumped up and inquired if he should not put it in the passage.  “It’s in the way here,” he explained; though in whose way it could be was not apparent, the table being perfectly empty.

Priscilla made no objection, and he at once removed it beyond the reach of his mother’s eye, propping it up in a dark corner of the passage and telling Mrs. Pearce, whom he found there that it was Mr. Neumann’s umbrella.

“No it ain’t,” said Mrs. Pearce.

“Yes it is,” said Robin.

“No it ain’t.  He’s took his to Minehead,” said Mrs. Pearce.

“It is, and he has not,” said Robin.

“I see him take it,” said Mrs. Pearce.

“You did not,” said Robin.

This would have been the moment, Mrs. Morrison felt, for her to go and to carry off Robin with her, but she was held in her seat by the certainty that Robin would not let himself be carried off; and sooner than say good-bye and then find he was staying on alone she would sit there all night.  Thus do mothers sacrifice themselves for their children, thought Mrs. Morrison, for their all too frequently thankless children.  But though she would do it to any extent in order to guard her boy she need not, she said to herself, be pleasant besides,—­she need not, so to speak, be the primroses on his path of dalliance.  Accordingly she behaved as little like a primrose as possible, sitting in stony silence while he skirmished in the passage with Mrs. Pearce, and the instant he came in again asked him where he had found the umbrella.

“I found it—­not far from the church,” said Robin, desiring to be truthful as long as he could.  “But mater, bother the umbrella.  It isn’t so very noble to bring a man back his own.  Did you get your cottages?” he asked, turning quickly to Priscilla.

“Robin, are you sure it is his own?” said his mother.