The conclusion, long ago come to by him, that Mark had been afflicted with the most intolerable set of relations ever owned by man, was destined to be furnished with yet another proof of validity at the end of the day.
As the two men came back across the fields of Sir Julian's property late in the afternoon, Mark whistling under his breath and Julian silent in the comfortable companionship of long association and mutual understanding, a sound of hoarse, ceaseless yelling that could have been produced by no other human larynx than that of Mark Easter's daughter came from the garden of the villa.
"I'm afraid that's Ruthie," said her parent, sensibly slackening his pace.
"I'm certain it is."
Ruthie was bent double across the dangerously creaking top bar of the wooden paling.
She raised a face, flushed and distorted, indeed, as much from her unnatural position as from her vocal efforts, but unstained by tears, and proclaimed aloud:
"Daddy, Peekaboo has been such a naughty boy. Sarah is putting him to bed and I'm singing so that he can hear me from the night-nursery window. He has written up in ink all over the drawing-room door, and the dining-room door, and the nursery door, 'The two best books in the world are "Why, Ben!" and the Bible.'"
III
Edna Rossiter, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.
Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness to her husband.