"Good-bye, Toady Lion," said Hugh John, "you can have my other bat and the white rat with the pink eyes."
Toady Lion stood with the lettuce leaves in his arms, looking on in a bored sort of way. Prissy could have slapped him if her hands had not been otherwise employed.
He did not say a word till his brother was perched up aloft on the dog-cart with his cricket bat nursed between his knees and a new hard-hat pulled painfully over his eyes. Then at last Toady Lion spoke. "Did 'oo find the funny fing behind the stable, Hugh John?"
Before Hugh John had time to reply, the dog-cart drove away amid sharp explosions of grief from the white-capped throng. Jane Housemaid dripped sympathy from a first-floor window till the gravel was wet as from a smart shower. Toady Lion alone stood on the steps with his usual expression of bored calmness. Then he turned to Prissy.
"Oh, you go away--you've got no heart!" said Prissy, and resumed her luxury of woe.
If Toady Lion had been a Gallic boy, we should have said that he shrugged his shoulders. At all events, he smiled covertly to the lettuces as he moved off in the direction of the rabbit-hutches.
"It was a _very_ funny fing w'at was behind the stable," he said. For Sir Toady Lion was a humorist. And you can't be a humorist without being a little hard-hearted. Only the heart of a professional writer of pathos can be one degree harder.
It was three years after. Sometimes three years makes a considerable change in grown-ups. More often it leaves them pretty much where they were. But with boys and girls the world begins all over again every two years at most. So the terms went and came, and at each vacation, instead of returning home, Hugh John went to London. For it so happened that the year he had left for school the house of Windy Standard was burned down almost to the ground, and Mr. Picton Smith took advantage of the fact to build an entirely new mansion on a somewhat higher site.
The first house might have been saved had the Bounding Brothers been in the neighbourhood, or indeed any active and efficient helpers. But the nearest engine was under the care of the Edam fire brigade, who upon hearing of the conflagration, with great enthusiasm ran their engine a quarter of a mile out of the town by hand. Then their ardour suddenly giving out, they sat down and had an amicable smoke on the roadside till the horse was brought to drag the apparatus the rest of the distance.
