less red than mine?  Prayers are held in the justicing-room, and thither we are all repairing.  The accustomed scene bursts on my eye.  At one end the long, straight row of the servants, immovably devout, staring at the wall, with their backs to us.  In the middle of the room, facing them, father, kneeling upon a chair with his hands clutched, and his eyes closed, repeating the church prayers, as if he were rather angry with them than otherwise.  Mother, kneeling on the carpet beside him, like the faithful, ruffed, and farthingaled wife on a fifteenth-century tomb.  Behind them, again, at some little distance, we and our visitor.  With the best will in the world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter.  The room is altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it.  I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither bulky nor obese, of a flat back and vigorous shoulders.  His face is generally hidden in his hands, but once or twice he lifts it to scan the proportions of my late grandfather’s preposterously fat cob, whose portrait hangs on the wall above his head.

There is no doubt that on some days the devil reigns with a more potent sway over people than on others.  Tonight he has certainly entered into the boys.  He often does a little, but this evening he is holding a great and mighty carnival among them.  While father’s strong, hard voice vibrates in a loud, dull monotone through the silent room, they are engaged in a hundred dumb yet ungodly antics behind his back.

Algernon has thrust his head far out between the rungs of his chair-back, and affects to be unable to withdraw it again, making movements of simulated suffocation.  The Brat is stealthily walking on his knees across the space that intervenes between them to Barbara, with intent, as I too well know, of unseemly pinchings.  If father unbutton his eyes, or move his head one barley-corn, we are all dead men.  I hold my breath in a nervous agony.  Thank Heaven! the harsh recitation still flows on with equable loud slowness.  In happy ignorance of his offspring’s antics, father is still asking, or rather ordering, the Almighty (for there is more of command than entreaty in his tone) to prosper the High Court of Parliament.  Also the Brat is now returning to his place, travelling with surprising noiseless rapidity over the Turkey carpet, dragging his shins and his feet after him.  I draw a long breath of relief, and drop my hot face into my spread hands.  My peace, however, is not of long duration.  I am aroused again by a sort of choking snort from Tou Tou, who is beside me—­a snort that seems compounded of mingled laughter and pain, and, looking up, detect Bobby in the act of deftly puncturing one of her long bare legs with a long brass pin, which he has found straying, after the vagabond manner of pins, over the carpet.