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has sometimes been afraid of his running away! What do you think of that? But soon he soft-pedalled on this theme, no doubt as not wanting to scale off relations like ourselves benevolently prepared to ‘solve the problems of the holidays’. As for the tutor, I gathered in a telephone conversation that he was to have been a Captain Peter Cox, VC, a worthy much too straight out of the romances of ‘Sapper’ to be quite our cup of tea. Do not, however, be alarmed! Now, it seems, the charge has been transferred to a Mr Thewless, whom Bernard described as ‘a very genteel man and something of a scholar’. Bernard had looked him up in some work of reference and found that he is given to writing little articles on Roman remains. So he may be quite a congenial man, and it occurs to me that he might be interested in the conical mound near Ballybags, which appears to me to be almost certainly defensive in type. Humphrey and this excellent bear-leader will be taking the light railway from Dundrane on Friday and you will no doubt send Billy to meet them.
     
    Your affectionate son,
    IVOR.

 
     
4
    As he drove to Euston, Mr Thewless, having a tidy mind, endeavoured to sort out his misgivings. He did not believe that Sir Bernard Paxton had read his article on the Roman villa excavated at Little Slumber. Being anxious to secure his services after all, Sir Bernard had simply looked him up in the likelier bibliographies and added a postscript designed to please. Every summer, as Mr Thewless very well knew, scores of Thewlesses attach themselves to little archaeological enterprises and happily potter away their holidays in insignificant siftings of the rubbish-dumps of the legionaries… But in Ireland – thought Mr Thewless irrelevantly – the armies of Rome had never set foot. There the Imperial Eagles had never been borne along the unending arrow-like roads that were the arteries of Latin culture. And the island was the worse of it to this day. Because the praetors of Augustus had left it to the generals of Elizabeth, to the Earl of Essex and Lord Grey de Wilton…
    But these scholastic reveries – thought Mr Thewless, bumped awake as his taxi jerked to a stop in a traffic-block – were off the present point. Sir Bernard was paying too much, too. For a residential holiday post five guineas would have been adequate and eight handsome. Fifteen was merely ominous. And along with the offer of it there had come fresh and disconcerting information. Humphrey Paxton was not merely difficult. There was now the suggestion that the unfortunate lad was a little off his head, and disposed to imagine conspiracies and dangers around him. It was with this that Mr Thewless was to be landed in the depths of Ireland and in a household of which he knew nothing.
    Mr Thewless frowned at the humped back of the taxi-driver. These were merely the reactions of a new housemaid who learns that it is two miles to the nearest bus stop. Rightly regarded, if the job was difficult it thereby carried only the more dignity. This was Paxton’s boy – say Newton’s, Galileo’s boy. The child of genius… And it was up to the new tutor to see him through.
    But there was the additional annoyance that Sir Bernard himself might not appear again. There had been the suggestion that the great man might be ‘urgently called away’. The quite childish suspicion came to Mr Thewless that he was really, in the vulgar phrase, being led up the garden path – or left holding the baby. Perhaps Sir Bernard had reason to avoid or dread a parting at a railway station. Perhaps in all innocence, but at the beckoning of the unconscious mind, he had contrived that the urgent calling away should happen. Perhaps here at Euston there would be immediate and embarrassing difficulty. Mr Thewless had a horrid vision of a lusty fifteen-year-old boy indulging in a hysterical fit on the platform… Various ineffective schemes occurred to him. They would see if any of the automatic machines