When we reached it they were all inside, sitting in committee on names.
'What shall you call yours?' I heard Milly ask Miss Sichliffe.
'Harvey,' she replied--'Harvey's Sauce, you know. He's going to be quite saucy when I've'--she saw Mrs. Godfrey and me coming through the French window--'when he's stronger.'
Attley, the well-meaning man, to make me feel at ease, asked what I thought of the name.
'Oh, splendid,' I said at random. 'H with an A, A with an R, R with a--'
'But that's Little Bingo,' some one said, and they all laughed.
Miss Sichliffe, her hands joined across her long knees, drawled, 'You ought always to verify your quotations.'
It was not a kindly thrust, but something in the word 'quotation' set the automatic side of my brain at work on some shadow of a word or phrase that kept itself out of memory's reach as a cat sits just beyond a dog's jump. When I was going home, Miss Sichliffe came up to me in the twilight, the pup on a leash, swinging her big shoes at the end of her tennis-racket.
''Sorry,' she said in her thick schoolboy-like voice. 'I'm sorry for what I said to you about verifying quotations. I didn't know you well enough and--anyhow, I oughtn't to have.'
'But you were quite right about Little Bingo,' I answered. 'The spelling ought to have reminded me.'