“Why?” said Fred, rather provoked.

“Such masterly eyes are not common among our gentlemen.  You will be quite her phoenix; and how much ‘Thomson’s Seasons’ you will have to hear!  I dare say you have had it already—­

  ‘Now, shepherds, to your helpless charge be kind!’”

“Well, very good advice, too,” said Fred.

“I hate and detest Thomson,” said Beatrice; “above all, for travestying Ruth into ‘the lovely young Lavinia;’ so whenever Jessie treated me to any of her quotations, I criticised him without mercy, and at last I said, by great good luck, that the only use of him was to serve as an imposition for young ladies at second-rate boarding schools.  It was a capital hit, for Alex found out that it was the way she learnt so much of him, and since that time I have heard no more of ’Jemmy Thomson!  Jemmy Thomson!  O!’”

The laughter which followed this speech had a tone in it, which, reaching Mr. Geoffrey Langford, who was walking a little in front with his mother, made him suspect that the young people were getting into such spirits as were not quite Sunday-like; and, turning round, he asked them some trifling question, which made him a party to the conversation, and brought it back to a quieter, though not less merry tone.

Dinner was at five, and Henrietta was dressed so late that Queen Bee had to come up to summon her, and bring her down after every one was in the dining-room—­an entrée all the more formidable, because Mr. Franklin was dining there, as well as Uncle Roger and Alexander.

Thanks in some degree to her own dawdling, she had been in a hurry the whole day, and she longed for a quiet evening:  but here it seemed to her, as with the best intentions it usually is, in a large party, that, but for the laying aside of needlework, of secular books and secular music, it might as well have been any other day of the week.

Her mamma was very tired, and went to bed before tea, the gentlemen had a long talk over the fire, the boys and Beatrice laughed and talked, and she helped her grandmamma to hand about the tea, answering her questions about her mother’s health and habits, and heard a good deal that interested her, but still she could not feel as if it were Sunday.  At Rocksand she used to sit for many a pleasant hour, either in the darkening summer twilight, or the bright red light of the winter fire, repeating or singing hymns, and enjoying the most delightful talks that the whole week had to offer, and now she greatly missed the conversation that would have “set this strange week to rights in her head,” as she said to herself.