A little pause.

"I suppose I have lost my way," he says, thinking, I fancy, that I look
rather eager to be gone. "I am never very good at the geography of a
strange house."

"Yes," say I, promptly; "you came through _our_ door, instead of your
own; shall I show you the way back?"

"Since I have come so far, may not I come a little farther?" he asks,
glancing rather longingly at the half-open school-room door, whence
sounds of pious mirth are again beginning to reissue.

"Do you mean _really?_" ask I, with a highly-dissuasive inflection of
voice. "Please not to-night; we are all higgledy-piggledy--at sixes and
sevens! To tell you the truth, we have been _cooking_. I wonder you did
not smell it in the drawing-room."

Again he looks amused.

"May not I cook too? I _can_, though you look disbelieving; there are
few people that can beat me at an Irish stew when I set my mind to it."

A head (Bobby's) appears round the school-room door.

"I say, Nancy, who are you colloquing with out there? I believe you have
got hold of our future benefact--"

An "oh!" of utter discomfiture, and the head is withdrawn.