“Doctor of what?” asked Mrs. Carey.

“Blamed if I know!  I wouldn’t trust him to doctor a sick cat.”

“People don’t have to be doctors of medicine,” interrupted Gilbert.  “Grandfather was Alexander Carey, LL.D.,—­Doctor of Laws, that is.”

Mr. Popham laid down his brush.  “I swan to man!” he ejaculated.  “If you don’t work hard you can’t keep up with the times!  Doctor of Laws!  Well, all I can say is they need doctorin’, an’ I’m glad they’ve got round to ’em; only Hen Lord ain’t the man to do ’em any good.”

“What has he done to make him so unpopular?” queried Mrs. Carey.

“Done?  He ain’t done a thing he’d oughter sence he was born.  He keeps the thou shalt not commandments first rate, Hen Lord does!  He neglected his wife and froze her blood and frightened her to death, poor little shadder!  He give up his position and shut the family up in that tomb of a house so ‘t he could study his books.  My boy knows his boy, an’ I tell you the life he leads them children is enough to make your flesh creep.  When I git roun’ to it I cal’late to set the house on fire some night.  Mebbe I’d be lucky enough to ketch Hen too, an’ if so, nobody in the village’d wear mournin’!  So fur, I can’t get Maria’s consent to be a cendenary.  She says she can’t spare me long enough to go to jail; she needs me to work durin’ the summer, an’ in the winter time she’d hev nobody to jaw, if I was in the lockup.”  This information was delivered in the intervals of covering the guest chamber walls with a delightful white moire paper which Osh always alluded to as the “white maria,” whether in memory of his wife’s Christian name or because his French accent was not up to the mark, no one could say.

Mr. Popham exaggerated nothing, but on the contrary left much unsaid in his narrative of the family at the House of Lords.  Henry Lord, with the degree of Ph.D. to his credit, had been Professor of Zoology at a New England college, but had resigned his post in order to write a series of scientific text books.  Always irritable, cold, indifferent, he had grown rapidly more so as years went on.  Had his pale, timid wife been a rosy, plucky tyrant, things might have gone otherwise, but the only memories the two children possessed were of bitter words and reproaches on their father’s side, and of tears and sad looks on their mother’s part.  Then the poor little shadow of a woman dropped wearily into her grave, and a certain elderly Mrs. Bangs, with grey hair and firm chin, came to keep house and do the work.

A lonelier creature than Olive Lord at sixteen could hardly be imagined.  She was a tiny thing for her years, with a little white oval face and peaked chin, pronounced eyebrows, beautifully arched, and a mass of tangled, untidy dark hair.  Her only interests in life were her younger brother Cyril, delicate and timid, and in continual terror of his father,—­and a passion for drawing and sketching