“I had no time for the practices,” said Harold, puzzled as to who Palnatoke was.

“Worse and worse!  You don’t mean that you shoot like this without practice?”

“Lucy taught me a little.”

“Well, if heaven-born archers come down on one, there’s nothing for it but submitting.  Robin Hood must prevail,” said Hippolyta, as the belt was handed over to Harold, with a sigh that made him say in excuse, “I would not have done it, but that Eustace wanted to have it in his hands, for family reasons.”

“Then let him look to it; I mean to get it again next year.  And, I say, Mr. Alison, I have a right to some compensation.  All you archers are coming to lunch at Therford on Thursday, if the sun shines, to be photographed, you know.  Now you must come to breakfast, and bring your lion’s skin and your bow—­to be done alone.  It is all the consolation I ask.  Make him, Lucy.  Bring him.”

There was no refusing; and that was the way the photograph came to be taken.  We were reminded by a note after we went home, including in the invitation Eustace, who, after being a little sulky, had made up his mind that a long range was easier to shoot at than a short one, and so that he should have won the prize if he had had the chance; and the notion of being photographed was, of course, delightful to him.

“In what character shall you take me?” he asked of Miss Horsman, when we were going out on the lawn, and it dawned on him that Harry was to be a Hercules.

“Oh! as Adonis, of course,” said Hippo.

“Or Eurystheus,” whispered her sister.

Eustace did not understand, and looked pleased, saying something about a truly classical get up; but Harold muttered to me, “Aren’t they making game of him?”

“They will take care not to vex him,” I said.

But Harold could not overlook it, and took a dislike to the Horsmans on the spot, which all Hippolyta’s genuine admiration of him could not overcome.  She knew what the work of his eighteen months in England had been, and revered him with such enthusiasm for what she called his magnificent manhood and beneficence, as was ready on the least encouragement to have become something a good deal warmer; but whatever she did served to make her distasteful to him.  First, she hastily shuffled over Eustace’s portrait, because, as she allowed us to hear, “he would give her no peace till he was disposed of.”  And then she not only tormented her passive victim a good deal in trying to arrange him as Hercules, but she forgot the woman in the artist, and tried to make him bare his neck and shoulder in a way that made him blush while he uttered his emphatic “No, no!” and Baby Jack supported him by telling her she “would only make a prize-fighter of him.”  Moreover, he would have stood more at ease if the whole of Therford had not been overrun with dogs.  He scorned to complain, and I knew him too well to do so for him; but it was a strain on his self-command to have them all smelling about his legs, and wanting to mumble the lion skin, especially Hippo’s great bloodhound, Kirby, as big as a calf, who did once make him start by thrusting his long cold nose into his hand.  Hippo laughed, but Harold could do nothing but force out a smile.