The boy came nearer. Then paused again and said, “I’m sure you can’t be Lord Frogmore.”
“Why not?” said Ralph, with his big laugh.
Duke looked at him critically and seriously, “Because you don’t look like a——, because I don’t think you’re a——.” What he wanted to say was that his new acquaintance was not a gentleman. Duke thought he was like the keepers. One of the grooms in his Sunday clothes had very much the air of this strange person who caught the sovereign in his hand in that clever way. But little Duke did not like to suggest, looking up into a big man’s face, that he was not a gentleman. So he stopped and stared, almost forgetting the Australian gold in this perplexity which was an experience not at all familiar to him.
“Not like a lord?” said Ralph. “How do you know? I don’t suppose you know many lords, do you, little man? I might be a duke for aught you know.”
The little boy stared again less assured. He had not been used to think of lords as a different species, but he had never known a duke. It was well within the limits of possibility that a duke might be like a gamekeeper. The species was unknown to little Marmaduke Parke.
“Are you a duke?” he asked with much seriousness and eyes very keen and sharp in the study of the new species. Ralph burst into a big laugh.
“No,” he said, “my little man, but I’m your uncle. Not Lord Frogmore, but one of the other side. I’m your Uncle Ralph. Come and shake hands.”
Duke advanced slowly as it were under protest, and at last ventured to place a little soft hand in the comparatively monstrous palm of Ralph, who squeezed the sovereign into it with such energy that the little boy cried out, and unaccustomed to such gratuities let the coin drop upon the path. But Duke picked it up with a practical sense which did him credit, and turned it over with eyes in which awe and eagerness were combined. He recognized the Queen’s head—but there was something about it which struck him as unusual. Unfortunately he could not yet read. He began to spell A—u—s——
“That’s Australia,” cried the newly-recognized uncle.
Duke, somewhat suspicious, handed the coin to nurse. “Oh, Master Duke, how can you?” cried that anxious woman. “A beautiful sovereign; and you’ve never thanked the kind gentleman. I don’t know, sir,” she said, curtseying to Ralph, “if his mamma would let him take it, for my mistress is very particular—but——”