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“And what kind of paints is it you want, Master Geoffrey?” asked Miss Potts pleasantly when he had told her what he had come for.

Most of her customers—and they were not numerous—were penny-toy customers, so she was very anxious to oblige her larger purchasers when she did get any. Not but what she was polite and kind to every one who entered her little shop; she did not know how to be anything else.

“It’s a shilling box I want, please,” said Geoffrey, as though such a purchase was quite a small matter to him, and jingling in his pocket all the while the shilling and a French halfpenny of his own. “I want Sans Poison, please,” he added—he pronounced it in the English way, so that it sounded like “Sands Poison”—“because then Loveday can’t harm herself if she swallows some. She always will lick her brush, and it’s no use trying to stop her.”

Miss Potts, in common with the children, felt the greatest respect and faith in that mysterious person “Sans,” who, according to their belief, had discovered how to make paints that any child might swallow and not die.