Edgar Doe knew that Mrs. Pennybet and Archie were coming in a row-boat from Falmouth, and it was a breathless moment when he saw them stepping on to the Graysroof landing-stage, and Lady Gray walking down the sloping lawn to meet them.

“Hallo, kid,” shouted Archie.  “Mother, there’s Edgar!”

Rather startled by this sudden notoriety, Edgar approached the new arrivals.

“Hallo, kid,” repeated Master Pennybet; and then stopped, his supply of greetings being exhausted.

“Hallo,” answered Edgar, slowly and rather shyly, for he was two years younger than anyone present.

“Welcome to the Fal,” said Lady Gray to Mrs. Pennybet.  “Archie, are you going to give me a kiss?”

“No,” announced Archie firmly.  “I don’t kiss mother’s friends now.”

Lady Gray concealed the fact that she thought her guest’s little boy a hateful child, and, having patted his head, sent him off with Edgar Doe to play in the Day-nursery.

Of course the Master of the Ceremonies in the Day-nursery was Master Pennybet.  Master Doe was his devoted mate.  The first game was a disgusting one, called “Spits.”  It consisted in the two combatants facing each other with open umbrellas, and endeavouring to register points by the method suggested in the title of the game; the umbrella was a shield, with which to intercept any good shooting.  Luckily for their self-respect in later years, this difficult game soon yielded place to an original competition, known as “Fire and Water.”  You placed a foot-bath under that portable gas-stove which was in the Day-nursery; you lit all the trivets in the stove to represent a house on fire; and you had a pail, ready to be filled from the bathroom, which, need we say, was the fire-station.  The rules provided that the winner was he who could extinguish the conflagration raging in the foot-bath in the shortest possible time, and with the least expenditure of water.  But the natural desire to win and to record good times meant that you were apt, in the haste and enthusiasm of the moment, to miss the bath entirely, and to flood quite a different part of the nursery.  It was this flaw in an otherwise simple game, which brought the play to an end.  Intimations that an aquatic tourney of some sort was the feature in the Day-nursery began to leak through to the room below.  The competitors were apprehended and brought for judgment before the ladies, who were sitting in the garden and watching the Fal as it streamed by to the sea.

“They had better go and play in the Beach Grove,” sighed Lady Gray.

This ruling Archie did not veto or contest, for he had wearied of indoor amusements, and felt that the well-timbered groves would afford new avenues for play.  So the boys departed like deer among the trunks of the trees.