"Only fancy, Chris," pursued Ridgwell, "calling her little boy Tom. Tom Tallcat; why, he'll be chaffed no end at school. I do feel sorry for him; and then the way she dresses him, coloured velvet and a brigand's hat with a feather in it, just as if he was part of a circus. I'm glad Mother doesn't dress me like that. The other day I met him and he'd got a bow and arrow. She'd actually sent him into the street with a bow and arrow. I said 'Hullo, Robin Hood,' not meaning anything, and he began to cry; it was awkward, and I'm sure he feels it. Father said that the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children ought to interfere, but I think that was perhaps only one of Father's jokes."
"I think," suggested Mother, who had caught audible fragments of this conversation, "I think you children had better run away now and play."
The morning appeared to go quite quickly up to the cutlets and the pancake stage.
The late afternoon shadows threw their creeping patterns over both lawns, and still there was no sign whatever of their eccentric friend Lal.
Tea-time came and passed, and then the shadows grew deeper, first blue, then violet, then black, the trees and shrubs could scarcely be distinguished at all; and, as ill luck would have it, there was no moon.
At length the time arrived when the family not unreasonably suggested that the blinds of the house should be pulled down. Here was a dilemma. How was it possible to warn the household of the Pleasant-Faced Lion's approach if the blinds were pulled down? When Ridgwell found, in spite of much lingering, that the last crumb of cake had been consumed, to say nothing of the last currant which he had made last quite a long time, and that the third summons to go to bed must have some sort of notice taken of it, he resigned himself to the inevitable, and with a hopeless look at Christine, prepared to talk to Father.
Father was reading quite quietly, and apparently deeply engrossed in a book, and somehow that didn't help matters.
"Please, Father, would you mind very much if the hall door and the back door were both left wide open all night?"
Father considered this somewhat odd request for a space, then inquired with a stray gleam of amusement in his eyes, "Do you consider the house stuffy? Or have you suddenly adopted one of the Futurist ideas concerning Health?"
"No, it isn't that, but Chris and I expect somebody; no, I mean something, and we should be so disappointed if it, no, I mean he didn't come."