"I have not your art," said Lord Newhaven, tranquilly, "of letting a man know when he's getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will be a row, and he'll be in it. I'm not made like that."

"It works well," said Dick. "It's a sort of peaceful way of rubbing along and keeping friends. If you let those poor bullies know what to expect they aren't, as a rule, over-anxious to toe the mark. But you never do let them know."

"No," said Lord Newhaven, as he shot his letter into the brass mouth in the cottage wall, just below a window of "bulls'-eyes" and peppermints, "I never do. I don't defend it. But—"

"But what?"

Lord Newhaven's face underwent some subtle change. His eyes fixed themselves on a bottle of heart-shaped peppermints, and then met Dick's suddenly, with the clear, frank glance of a schoolboy.

"But somehow, for the life of me, until things get serious—I can't."

Dick, whose perceptions were rather of a colossal than an acute order, nevertheless perceived that he had received a confidence, and changed the subject.

"Aren't you going to buy some stamps?" he asked, perfectly aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.

Lord Newhaven, who was being watched with affectionate interest from behind the counter by the grocer postmaster, went in, hit his head against a pendent ham, and presently emerged with brine in his hair and a shilling's worth of stamps in his hand.

Later in the day, when he and Dick were riding up the little street, with a view to having a look at the moor—for Middleshire actually has a grouse moor, although it is in the Midlands—the grocer in his white apron rushed out and waylaid them.

"Very sorry about the letter, my lord," he repeated volubly, touching his forelock. "Hope her la'ship told you as I could not get it out again, or I'm sure I would have done to oblige your lordship, and her la'ship calling on purpose. But the post-office is that mean and distrustful as it don't leave me the key, and once hanything is in, in it is."

"Ah!" said Lord Newhaven, slowly. "Well, Jones, it's not your fault. I ought not to have changed my mind. I suppose her ladyship gave you my message that I wanted it back?"

"Yes, my lord, and her la'ship come herself, not ten minutes after you was gone. But I've no more power over that there receptacle than a hunlaid hegg, and that's the long and short of it. I've allus said, and I say it again, 'Them as have charge of the post-office should have the key.'"

"When I am made postmaster-general you shall have it," said Lord Newhaven, smiling. "It is the first reform that I shall bring about." And he nodded to the smiling, apologetic man and trotted on, Dick beside him, who was apparently absorbed in the action of his roan cob.

But Dick's mind had sustained a severe shock. That Lady Newhaven, "that jolly little woman," the fond mother of those two "jolly little chaps," should have been guilty of an underhand trick, was astonishing to him.