Nellie shut her lips.
"Were you teasing Carlo?" Edward Henry demanded curtly of his son.
"I don't know."
Whenever anybody asked that child for a piece of information he almost invariably replied, "I don't know."
"How—you don't know? You must know whether you were teasing the dog or not!" Edward Henry was nettled.
The renewed spectacle of his own wound had predisposed Robert to feel a great and tearful sympathy for himself. His mouth now began to take strange shapes and to increase magically in area, and beads appeared in the corners of his large eyes.
"I—I was only measuring his tail by his hind leg," he blubbered and then sobbed.
Edward Henry did his best to save his dignity.
"Come, come!" he reasoned, less menacingly. "Boys who can read Encyclopaedias mustn't be cry-babies. You'd no business measuring Carlo's tail by his hind leg. You ought to remember that that dog's older than you." And this remark, too, he thought rather funny, but apparently he was alone in his opinion.
Then he felt something against his calf. And it was Carlo's nose. Carlo was a large, very shaggy and unkempt Northern terrier, but owing to vagueness of his principal points, due doubtless to a vagueness in his immediate ancestry, it was impossible to decide whether he had come from the north or the south side of the Tweed. This ageing friend of Edward Henry's, surmising that something unusual was afoot in his house, and having entirely forgotten the trifling episode of the bite, had unobtrusively come to make inquiries.