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 at him between his curling pink fingers, and getting porridge on his hair.

Derek thought: "I believe I'll buy some of those women's magazines. A fellow might get some pointers from them after all."

He had determined that he would see Mrs. Machin that day, tell her that he and the boy were alone, and beg her to come back and keep house for them. Surely no woman with a heart in her body could refuse him when he told her of yesterday's fright.

He had Bill bring the red sleigh to the door. When Buckskin heard the bells jingling and saw Derek fetching his rabbit skin coat and cap with the earlugs, he could hardly contain himself for joy. He kicked his heels and shouted. He showed all his pearl-like teeth, and Jock, to add to the gaiety, leaped to the couch, put his nose to the window-pane and gave forth a volley of short, mad barks.

Mrs. Machin came out of her sister's cottage near the lighthouse and stood with folded arms, on the doorstep, listening to Derek's recital. She did not look at Derek while he talked, but stared out over the scene familiar since her birth. The pier was thronged with gulls, resting quietly with folded wings in the February sunlight. Sometimes one rose and sailed aloft, his cries mingling with the constant whining of the reels. A smell of fish and wood fires ascended from the fishing huts on the shore.

"Well," said Mrs. Machin, when he had finished, "it's just about what I had expected. That rat Jammery, eh? I could have told you so. D'ye mind the time I sat up two whole nights to keep her in the room where you'd put her? But she was one of the kind that wouldn't stay put no matter what you'd do."

"Mrs. Machin, are you coming back to me?"

She looked at him ruminatively now out of her pale