“He has that Rupert’s eyes.”

For a moment she was quite taken aback, and then timorously replied:  “Yes, they are very blue.”

“Very blue,” repeated the Colonel.

Mrs. Ray thereupon felt she must obviate an uncomfortable silence, and began with a nervous laugh: 

“He was born when we were in Geneva, you know, and we used to call him ‘our mountain boy,’ saying that he had brought a speck of the mountain skies away in his eyes.”

The Colonel conceded a smile, but addressed his reply to the child:  “A mountain boy, is he?” and, placing his hand on Rupert’s head, he turned the small face upward, and watched it break into a smile.  “Well, well.  A mountain boy, eh?—­from the lake of Geneva.  H’m. Il a dans les yeux un coin du lac.”

At this happy description the tears of pleasure sprang to the foolish eyes of Mrs. Ray, while Rupert, thinking with much wisdom that all the conditions were favourable, gazed up into the Colonel’s face, and fired his last shot.

“What really was the fair-haired knight’s name?”

“Perhaps you will know some day,” answered the Colonel, half playfully, half wearily.

Sec.2

In the course of the same summer Master Archibald Pennybet, of Wimbledon, celebrated his eighth birthday.  He celebrated it by a riotous waking-up in the sleeping hours of dawn; he celebrated it by a breakfast which extended him so much that his skin became unbearably tight; and then, in a new white sailor-suit and brown stockings turned over at the calves to display a couple of magnificent knees, he celebrated some more of it in the garden.  There on the summer lawn he stood, unconsciously deliberating how best to give new expression to the personality of Archibald Pennybet.  He was dark, gloriously built, and possessed eyes that lazily drooped by reason of their heavy lashes; and, I am sorry to say, he evoked from a boudoir window the gurgling admiration of his fashionable mother, who, while her hair was being dressed, allowed her glance to swing from her hand-mirror, which framed a gratifying vision of herself, to the window, which framed a still more gratifying vision of her son.  “He gets his good looks from me,” she thought.  And, having noticed the drooping of his eyelids, over-weighted with lashes, she brought her hand-mirror into play again.  “He is lucky,” she added, “to have inherited those lazy eyes from me.”

Soon Archie retired in the direction of the kitchen-garden.  The kitchen-garden, with its opportunities of occasional refreshment such as would not add uncomfortably to his present feeling of tightness, was the place for a roam.  Five minutes later he was leaning against the wire-netting of the chicken-run, and offering an old cock, who asked most pointedly for bread, a stone.  To know how to spend a morning was no easier on a birthday than on any ordinary day.