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 evident that he took no sort of interest in the schooling which it was his arbitrary whim to provide. Nor would Jan have minded this for a moment—for it was nothing new—if he had not caught such a very different old fellow smiling on the other grandchildren in the snow.

His grandmother went to the opposite extreme; she took only too much notice of the lad, for it was notice of a most embarrassing kind. Her duty towards Jan, as she conceived it, was to supplement the Public School in turning him out as much of a gentleman as was possible at this advanced stage of his development. Mrs. Ambrose began the holidays by searching through her spectacles for the first term's crop of visible improvements. Very few were brought to light by this method; but a number of inveterate blemishes were found to have survived, and each formed a subject of summary stricture as it reappeared. Mrs. Ambrose was one of those formidable old ladies whom no exigencies of time or place can restrain from saying exactly what they think. Jan could not come into a room, but her spectacles dogged his footsteps, and he was always liable to be turned back on the threshold "to wipe them properly"; if he had changed his boots, his fingers and nails came in for scrutiny instead, or it might be his collar or his hair. He seldom sat at table without hearing that he had used the wrong fork, or that knives were not made to enter mouths, even with cheese upon their point. As in the case of his reception by the rector, the lad would have been much less resentful if the other grandchildren had not been present, and their equally glaring misdemeanours consistently overlooked; he did not realise that the old lady's sight was failing, and that she deliberately had him next her "for his own good."

He disliked the other grandchildren none the less, but