“Help!  Help!” she cried.  “The horrible boy!  Catch it!  Kill it!”

Jimmy gazed at her in amazement, and Barbara looked with interest at Aunt Evangeline’s long expanse of shin.

“My legs isn’t like your legs,” she said pleasantly and conversationally.  “My legs is knees.”

It was some time before order was restored, the centipede killed, and Jimmy’s remaining gifts thrown out of the window.  William looked across the table at Jimmy with respect in his eye.  Jimmy, in spite of his youth, was an acquaintance worth cultivating.  Jimmy was eating porridge unconcernedly.

Aunt Evangeline had rushed from the room when the slaughter of the centipede had left the coast clear, and refused to return.  She carried on a conversation from the top of the stairs.

“When that horrible child has gone, I’ll come.  He may have insects concealed on his person.  And someone’s been dropping water all over these stairs.  They’re damp!”

“Dear, dear!” murmured Aunt Jane, sadly.

Jimmy looked up from his porridge.

“How was I to know she didn’t like insecks?” he said, aggrievedly. “I like ’em.”

William’s mother’s despair was only tempered by the fact that this time William was not the culprit.  To William also it was a novel sensation.  He realised the advantages of a fellow criminal.

After breakfast peace reigned.  William’s father went out for a walk with Robert.  The aunts sat round the drawing-room fire talking and doing crochet-work.  In this consists the whole art and duty of aunthood. All aunts do crochet-work.

They had made careful inquiries about the time of the service.

“You needn’t worry,” had said William’s mother.  “It’s at 10.30, and if you go to get ready when the clock in the library strikes ten it will give you heaps of time.”

[Illustration:  AROUND THEM LAY, MOST INDECENTLY EXPOSED, THE INTERNAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE LIBRARY CLOCK.]

Peace ... calm ... quiet.  Mrs. Brown and Ethel in the kitchen supervising the arrangements for the day.  The aunts in the drawing-room discussing over their crochet-work the terrible way in which their sisters had brought up their children.  That, also, is a necessary part of aunthood.

Time slipped by happily and peacefully.  Then William’s mother came into the drawing-room.

“I thought you were going to church,” she said.

“We are.  The clock hasn’t struck.”

“But—­it’s eleven o’clock!”

There was a gasp of dismay.

“The clock never struck!”

Indignantly they set off to the library.  Peace and quiet reigned also in the library.  On the floor sat William and Jimmy gazing with frowns of concentration at an open page of “Things a Boy Can Do.”  Around them lay most indecently exposed the internal arrangements of the library clock.

“William!  You wicked boy!”