Eustace came too, as if he wanted the amusement and yet was ashamed to take it, when he exclaimed, “I say, Harry; isn’t this the book father used to tell us about—­that they used to look over?”

Harold came, and stood towering above us with his hands in his pockets; but when we came to the Temptation of Eve, Dora broke out into an exclamation that excited my curiosity too much not to be pursued, though it was hardly edifying.

“Was that such a snake as Harold killed?”

“I have killed a good many snakes,” he answered.

“Yes, but I meant the ones you killed when you were a little tiny boy.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, as if to stop the subject, hating, as he always did, to talk about himself.

“No, I know you don’t,” said Dora; “but it is quite true, isn’t it, Eustace?”

“Hardly true that Harold ever was a little tiny boy,” I could not help saying.

“No, he never was little,” said Eustace.  “But it is quite true about the snakes.  I seem to remember it now, and I’ve often heard my mother and my Aunt Alice tell of it.  It was at the first place where we were in New South Wales.  I came running out screaming, I believe--I was old enough to know the danger—­and when they went in there was Harry sitting on the floor, holding a snake tight by the neck and enjoying its contortions like a new toy.”

“Of course,” said Harold, “if it were poisonous, which I doubt, the danger would have been when I let go.  My mother quietly bade me hold him tight, which I suppose I had just sense enough to do, and in another moment she had snatched up the bill-hook they had been cutting wood with, and had his head off.  She had the pluck.”

I could but gasp with horror, and ask how old he was.  About two!  That was clear to their minds from the place where it happened which Harold could not recollect, though Eustace could.

“But, Harold, you surely are the eldest,” I said.

“Oh no; I am six months the eldest,” said Eustace, proud of his advantage.

We were to hear more of that by-and-by.

Monday afternoon brought Mr. Prosser, who was closeted with Harold, while Eustace and I devoted our faculties to pacifying Dora under her exclusion, and preventing her from climbing up to the window-sill to gaze into the library from without.  She scorned submission to either of us, so Eustace kept guard by lying on the grass below, and I coaxed her by gathering primroses, sowing seeds, and using all inducements I could think of, but my resources were nearly exhausted when Harold’s head appeared at the window, and he called, “Eustace!  Lucy! here!”

We came at once, Dora before us.

“Come in,” said Harold, admitting us at the glass door.  “It is all a mistake.  I am not the man.  It is Eustace.  Eu, I wish you joy, old chap—­”

Mr. Prosser was at the table with a great will lying spread out on it.  “I am afraid Mr. Alison is right, Miss Alison,” he said.  “The property is bequeathed to the eldest of the late Mr. Alison’s grandsons born here, not specifying by which father.  If I had copied the terms of the will I might have prevented disappointment, but I had no conception of what he tells me.”