The Great Man rose to address his audience.
"Ladies and gentlemen—I must begin by apologising for my late arrival," he said with dignity. "I have been unavoidably delayed."
He tried not to meet William's father's eye as he made the statement.
CHAPTER II
THE CURE
Breakfast was not William's favourite meal. With his father shut off from the world by his paper, and his mother by her letters, one would have thought that he would have enjoyed the clear field thus left for his activities. But William liked an audience—even a hostile one consisting of his own family. True, Robert and Ethel, his elder brother and sister, were there; but Robert's great rule in life was to ignore William's existence. Robert would have preferred not to have had a small freckled, snub-nosed brother. But as Fate had given him such a brother, the next best thing was to pretend that he did not exist. On the whole, William preferred to leave Robert alone. And Ethel was awful at breakfast—quite capable of summoning the Head of the Family from behind his Daily Telegraph when William essayed a little gentle teasing. This morning William, surveying his family in silence in the intervals of making a very hearty meal, came to the conclusion, not for the first time, that they were hardly worthy of him: Ethel, thinking she was so pretty in that stuck-up-looking dress, and grinning over that letter from that soft girl. Robert talking about football and nobody listening to him, and glaring at him (William) whenever he tried to tell him what nonsense he was talking about it. No, it wasn't rounders he was thinking of—he knew 'bout football, thank you, he just did. His mother—suddenly his mother put down her letter.
"Great-Aunt Jane's very ill," she said.
There was a sudden silence. Mr. Brown's face appeared above the Daily Telegraph.
"Um?" he said.
"Great-Aunt Jane's very ill," said Mrs. Brown. "They don't seem to think there's much chance of her getting better. They say——" She looked again at the letter as if to make quite sure: "They say she wants to see William. She's never seen him, you know."