'Then, please, what does come to the five wupees?' asked Jerry urgently.

'Practical boy!' commented Jack Raymond with a laugh. 'It is "as you was" generally; for you see, Jerry, the world backs the favourite as a rule. It likes to follow a lead! And, if you divide the total of the tickets by their number, it's poor fun! So take my advice, young man; when you totalise, go for a rank outsider and stand to collar the lot!'

Lesley Drummond, being the child's governess, frowned. 'I see your mother arriving, Gerald,' she said, 'and we were to join her at once. Come!'

But Jerry held his new-found friend fast by the hand. 'You come too,' he petitioned, 'my mother is just an orful nice person.'

There was a moment's pause, during which the child's grip on the man tightened, before the latter replied, 'I know that, Jerry; your mother and I are old friends; but I have only time to see you safe across the green. I'm up in this race.'

'I used to wide waces when I was in India once,' began the child, when Lesley cut him short.

'You never rode a race in your life, Gerald, and I can't allow you to say that you have.' Then she turned suddenly, in the purely impersonal confidence of grievance, to the stranger beside her (for they had only just been introduced to each other), and said, 'I can't think why, but ever since Gerald landed in Bombay, just a week ago, he has had a bad habit of claiming to have done all sorts of things he never could have done. Lady Arbuthnot thinks it is because the child really does remember India a little. You see he was past four when he went home. But that,' she added magisterially, with a frown for the culprit, 'does not excuse telling stories--does it?'

The man's blue eyes, so curiously overshadowed by thick bushy fair eyebrows, sought the child's cool grey ones, and a sudden reflection of the perplexed obstinacy he saw in them came to his own.

'How the deuce do you know he hasn't?' he muttered, half to himself. 'This isn't England, where you can bet your last dib on certainties.' Then he looked at the immaculate white collar and cuffs of the figure in a tailor-made coat and skirt beside him, and gave in to convention by adding resignedly, 'But you mustn't tell whackers, you know, Jerry--must you?'

'I don't!' protested the six-year-old. 'I weally thought I had. But I will, anyhow, when I'm big. An' I'll bet wif the bookies evewy time, Mr. Waymond, like you do.'