Bending down he took up out of the box a bundle of envelopes, copybooks, and Christmas cards.  Then he sat himself down on a chair in the window, and began going through what he held, carefully and methodically.

Suddenly through the open door there came a cry of “Miss Rosamund, I want you!”

Rosamund got up reluctantly.  “Nanna’s a regular tyrant!”

“Leave all this to me,” he said.  “I’ll find the prescription if it’s here.”

She went off, and almost at once he came to a folded bit of paper.  Perhaps this was the prescription?  He opened it, and this is what he read:—­

March 12, 1919.  This is the happiest day of my life.  One of my godmothers has died and left me L50.  I am going to buy two nanny-goats, a boy and a girl.  They will have kids, and I shall make munny.  We shall then have a propper cook, and I shall never help Betty wash up any more.  I wish my other godmother would die.  She is very genrus and kind—­she would go strait to Heaven.  But she is very hellfy.

Poor little Timmy!  Dear little unscrupulous child of nature!  Would Timmy wish him, Godfrey Radmore, dead, if some accident were to reveal to him what a great difference it would make to them all?  He hoped not.  But he couldn’t feel sure, for, from being well-to-do the Tosswills must have become poor, painfully and, to his mind, unnaturally poor.

Further search proved the prescription was not in the play-box, and he went downstairs.  Still that same unnatural silence through the house.  Where could Timmy be?  Somehow he felt that he wanted to see Timmy and find out about the nanny-goats.  He feared his godson’s expectations of wealth had not been fulfilled, but he supposed that there was a “propper cook,” probably the lack of her had been quite temporary.

He wandered into the drawing-room.  In the old days all five sitting-rooms had been in use.  Now four of them were closed, and the drawing-room was everybody’s meeting place.  Dolly was there working a carpet-sweeper languidly.

“Where’s everybody?” he asked.

“I think Betty and Timmy are still in the scullery.  I don’t know where Rosamund is.”

“I suppose I can go into the scullery?”

She looked at him dubiously.  “Yes, if you’d like to—­certainly.  Betty loves cooking and all that sort of thing.  I hate it—­so in our division of labour, I do the other kind of housework.”  She looked ruffled and he told himself, a little maliciously, that she was not unlike a lazy, rather incompetent, housemaid.  “If it’s Timmy you want,” she continued, “I’ll go and see if he can come.”

“Please don’t trouble.  I’ll find him all right.”

Radmore went out into the passage.  As the baize door, which shut off the kitchen quarters, opened, he saw his godson and Rosamund before they saw him, and he heard Rosamund say, in a cross tone:  “It only means that someone else will have to help her; I think it’s very selfish of you, Timmy.”