* * * * *

Miss Priscilla Greene was pouring out tea in the drawing-room.  Two young men and a maiden were the recipients of her hospitality.

“Dad will be here in a minute,” she said.  “He’s just gone to the dark-room to see to some photos he’d left in toning or fixing, or something.  We’ll get on with the rehearsal as soon as he comes.  We’d just rehearsed the scene he and I have together, so we’re ready for the ones where we all come in.”

“How did it go off?”

“Oh, quite well.  We knew our parts, anyway.”

“I think the village will enjoy it.”

“Anyway, it’s never very critical, is it?  And it loves a melodrama.”

“Yes.  I wonder if father knows you’re here.  He said he’d come straight back.  Perhaps I’d better go and find him.”

“Oh, let me go, Miss Greene,” said one of the youths ardently.

“Well, I don’t know whether you’d find the place.  It’s a shed in the garden that he uses.  We use half as a dark-room and half as a coal-cellar.”

“I’ll go—­”

He stopped.  A nightmare sound, as discordant as it was ear-splitting, filled the room.  Miss Greene sank back into her chair, suddenly white.  One of the young men let a cup of tea fall neatly from his fingers on to the floor and there crash into fragments.  The young lady visitor emitted a scream that would have done credit to a factory siren.  Then at the open French window appeared a small boy holding a bugle, purple-faced with the effort of his performance.

One of the young men was the first to recover speech.  He stepped away from the broken crockery on the floor as if to disclaim all responsibility for it and said sternly: 

“Did you make that horrible noise?”

Miss Greene began to laugh hysterically.

“Do have some tea now you’ve come,” she said to Ginger.

Ginger remembered the pangs of hunger, of which excitement had momentarily rendered him oblivious, and, deciding that there was no time like the present, took a cake from the stand and began to consume it in silence.

“You’d better be careful,” said the young lady to her hostess; “he might have escaped from the asylum.  He looks mad.  He had a very mad look, I thought, when he was standing at the window.”

“He’s evidently hungry, anyway.  I can’t think why father doesn’t come.”

Here Ginger, fortified by a walnut bun, remembered his mission.

“It’s all right now,” he said.  “You can go home.  He’s shut up.  Me an’ William shut him up.”

“You see!” said the young lady with a meaning glance around.  “I said he was from the asylum.  He looked mad.  We’d better humour him and ring up the asylum.  Have another cake, darling boy,” she said in a tone of honeyed sweetness.

Nothing loth, Ginger selected an ornate pyramid of icing.

At this point there came a bellowing and crashing and tramping outside and Miss Priscilla’s father, roaring fury and threats of vengeance, hurled himself into the room.  Miss Priscilla’s father had made his escape by a small window at the other end of the shed.  To do this he had had to climb over the coals in the dark.  His face and hands and clothes and once-white beard were covered with coal.  His eyes gleamed whitely.