Teeth clenched, crimson-cheeked, she side-stepped, feinted, and whipped in an upper-cut.  Then, darting in, she drove home her left with all her might; and Scott went down with an unmistakable thud.

“One—­two—­three—­four,” she counted, “and you did tell a lie, didn’t you?  Five—­six—­Oh, Scott!  I’ve made your nose bleed horridly!  Does it hurt, dear?  Seven—­eight——­”

The boy, still confused, rose and instinctively assumed the classic attitude of self-defence; but his sister threw down her gloves and offered him her handkerchief, saying:  “You’ve just got to be fair to me now, Scott.  Tell me that I throw straight and that I did hit Olga!”

He hesitated; wiped his nose: 

“I take it back.  You can throw straight.  Ginger!  What a crack you just gave me!”

She was all compunction and honey now, hovering around him where he stood stanching honourable wounds.  After a while he laughed.  “Thunder!” he exclaimed ruefully; “my nose seems to be growing for fair.  You’re all right, Geraldine.”

“Here’s my last cup-cake, if you like,” said his sister, radiant.

Embarrassed a little by defeat, but nursing no bitterness, he sat down on the leather divan again and permitted his sister to feed him and tell him that his disaster was only an accident.  He tried to think so, too, but serious doubts persisted in his mind.  There had been a clean-cut finish to that swing and jab which disturbed his boy’s conceit.

“We’ll try it again,” he began.  “I’m all right now, if you like——­”

“Oh, Scott, I don’t want to!”

“Well, we ought to know which of us really can lick the other——­”

“Why, of course, you can lick me every time.  Besides, I wouldn’t want to be able to lick you—­except when I’m very, very angry.  And I ought not to become angry the way I do.  Kathleen tries so hard to make me stop and reflect before I do things, but I can’t seem to learn....  Does your nose hurt?”

“Not in the least,” said her brother, reddening and changing the subject.  “I say, it looks as though it were going to stop raining.”

He went to the window; the big Seagrave house with its mansard roof, set in the centre of an entire city block, bounded by Madison and Fifth Avenues and by Ninety-fifth and Ninety-sixth Streets, looked out from its four red brick facades onto strips of lawn and shrubbery, now all green and golden with new grass and early buds.

It was topsy-turvy, March-hare weather, which perhaps accounted for the early April dementia that possessed the children at recurring intervals, and which nothing ever checked except the ultimate slumber of infantile exhaustion.

If anybody in the house possessed authority to punish them, nobody exercised it.  Servants grown gray in the Seagrave service endured much, partly for the children’s sakes, partly in memory of the past; but the newer and younger domestics had less interest in the past glories and traditions of an old New York family which, except for two little children, ten years old, had perished utterly from the face of the land.