‘I withdraw what I said about friend Batkins being a teetotaller,’ said Bill after dinner that night to me. ‘No man could have bowled as rottenly as he did after lunch, on lemonade. It was the sort of stuff you get in a village game — very fast and beautifully inaccurate,’
Then I told him how it had happened, and he owned that his suspicions were unjust. We were in the drawing-room at the fire. The drawing-room is just over the kitchen. Bill stretched out his hands, palms downwards, and looked at the floor.
‘Bless you, my children!’ he said.
Bill is really an awfully good sort. When I was leaving Aunt Edith’s, he came up and gave me a mysterious little paper parcel. I opened it, and inside it was a jeweller’s cardboard box. And inside that, in cotton wool, was the duckiest little golden bat.
‘A presentation bat,’ he explained, ‘because you made a century for Gentlemen v. Players.’