"There's a lady coming," he said briskly,—"for goodness' sake, get out of the way. Go home—hide—vanish somehow! I can't be seen with a pack of dirty kids." His brothers and sisters were indeed rather dirty, because, earlier in the day, the Lamb, in his infant state, had sprinkled a good deal of garden soil over them. The grown-up Lamb's voice was so tyrant-like, as Jane said afterwards, that they actually retreated to the back garden, and left him with his little mustache and his flannel suit to meet alone the young lady, who now came up the front garden wheeling a bicycle.
The woman of the house came out, and the young lady spoke to her,—the Lamb raised his hat as she passed him,—and the children could not hear what she said, though they were craning round the corner and listening with all their ears. They felt it to be "perfectly fair," as Robert said, "with that wretched Lamb in that condition."
When the Lamb spoke, in a languid voice heavy with politeness, they heard well enough.
"A puncture?" he was saying. "Can I not be of any assistance? If you could allow me——?"
There was a stifled explosion of laughter and the grown-up Lamb (otherwise Devereux) turned the tail of an angry eye in its direction.
"You're very kind," said the lady, looking at the Lamb. She looked rather shy, but, as the boys put it, there didn't seem to be any nonsense about her.
"But oh," whispered Cyril, "I should have thought he'd had enough bicycle-mending for one day—and if she only knew that really and truly he's only a whiny-piny, silly little baby!"
"He's not," Anthea murmured angrily. "He's a dear—if people only let him alone. It's our own precious Lamb still, whatever silly idiots may turn him into—isn't he, Pussy?"
Jane doubtfully supposed so.
Now, the Lamb—whom I must try to remember to call St. Maur—was examining the lady's bicycle and talking to her with a very grown-up manner indeed. No one could possibly have supposed, to see and hear him, that only that very morning he had been a chubby child of two years breaking other people's Waterbury watches. Devereux (as he ought to be called for the future) took out a gold watch when he had mended the lady's bicycle, and all the hidden onlookers said "Oh!"—because it seemed so unfair that the Baby, who had only that morning destroyed two cheap but honest watches, should now, in the grown-upness to which Cyril's folly had raised him, have a real gold watch—with a chain and seals!