"An' you wasn't even ever squire," he said. Then he brightened.

"They were jolly good cakes, wasn't they?" he said.

William's lips curved into a smile of blissful reminiscence.

"_Jolly_ good!" he agreed.




CHAPTER V

WILLIAM'S HOBBY


Uncle George was William's godfather, and he was intensely interested
in William's upbringing. It was an interest with which William would
gladly have dispensed. Uncle George's annual visit was to William a
purgatory only to be endured by a resolutely philosophic attitude of
mind and the knowledge that sooner or later it must come to an end.
Uncle George had an ideal of what a boy should be, and it was a
continual grief to him that William fell so short of this ideal. But
he never relinquished his efforts to make William conform to it.

His ideal was a gentle boy of exquisite courtesy and of intellectual
pursuits. Such a boy he could have loved. It was hard that fate had
endowed him with a godson like William. William was neither quiet nor
gentle, nor courteous nor intellectual--but William was intensely
human.