His father was giving his parting instructions to his eldest son.
"Work hard, my boy," he said. "Tell the truth, never tell tales, nor yet listen to them. Mind your own business. Don't fight, if you can help it; but if you have to, be sure you get home with your left before the other fellow. Practise your bowling, the batting will practise itself. And when you play golf, keep your eye on the ball."
"I'll try to play up, father," said Hugh John, "and anyway I won't be 'dasht-mean'!"
His father was satisfied.
Then it was Prissy who came to say good-bye. She had made all sorts of good resolutions, but in less than half a minute she was bawling undisguisedly on the hero's neck. And as for the hero—well, we will not say what he was doing, something most particularly unheroic at any rate.
Janet Sheepshanks hovered in the background, saying all the time, "For shame, Miss Priscilla, think shame o' yoursel'—garring the laddie greet like that when he's gaun awa'!"
But even Janet herself was observed to blow her own nose very often, and to offer Hugh John the small garden hoe instead of the neatly wrapped new silk umbrella she had bought for him out of her own money.
And all the while Sir Toady Lion kept on carrying milk and fresh lettuce leaves to his stupid lop-eared rabbits. Yet it was by no means insensibility which kept him thus busied. He was only playing his usual lone hand.
Yet even Toady Lion was not without his own proper sense of the importance of the occasion.
"There's a funny fing 'at you wants to see at the stile behind the stable," he remarked casually to Hugh John, as he went past the front door with an armful of hay for bedding, "but I promised not to tell w'at it is."