“You talk as if he were eighty years old,” cry I, with an unaccountably personal feeling of annoyance.  “He is only forty-seven!”

“Only forty-seven!”

And they all laugh.

“Well, I must be going, I suppose,” cry I, leisurely rising, stretching, sighing, and beginning to collect the various articles of my wardrobe, scattered over the furniture.  “Good-by, dear teapot! good-by, dear plum loaf! how I wish I was going to stay with you!  It really is ten minutes past dressing—­time, and father is always so pleased when one keeps him waiting for his soup.”

“He would not say any thing to you to-day if you were late,” says Bobby, astutely.  “You might tumble over his gouty foot, and he would smile!  Are we not the most united family in Christendom—­when we have company?”

After all, I need not have disquieted myself; I am in very good time.  When I open the drawing-room door, and make my entrance in the borrowed splendor of Barbara’s broad blue-sash tails, and the white virginity of my own muslin frock, I find that neither of my parents have as yet made their appearance.  Sir Roger has the hearth-rug to himself; at least he only shares it with Vick, and she is asleep; sitting very upright, it is true, with her thin tail round her toes, like a cat’s, her head and whole body swaying from side to side in indisputable slumber.  At sight of the chaste and modest apparition that the opened door yields to his gaze, an exclamation of pleasure escapes him—­at least it sounds like pleasure.

“Ah! this is all right!  You are here to-night at all events; but, by-the-by, what became of you yesterday?”

“What always becomes of me?” reply I, bluntly, lifting my grave gray eyes to his face, and to the hair which sweeps thick and waved above his broad brown forehead. (Tongs indeed!)

“I remember that you told me you had been cooking, but you cannot cook every night.”

“Not quite,” reply I, with a short smile, stretching my hands to the blaze.

“But do not you dine generally?”

“Never when I can possibly help it,” I reply, with emphasis.  And no sooner are the words out of my mouth than I see that I have already transgressed my mother’s commands, and given vent to one of “my unlucky things.”  I stand silent and ashamed, reflecting that no after-tinkering will mend my unfortunate speech.

“And to-night you could not help it?” he asks, after a slight, hardly perceptible pause.

I look up to answer him.  He is forty-seven years old.  He is a general, and a sir, and has been in every known land; has killed big and little beasts, and known big and little people, and I am nineteen and nobody, and have rarely been beyond our own park and parish, and my acquaintance is confined to half a dozen turnipy squires and their wives; and yet he is looking snubbed, and it is I that have snubbed him.  Well, I cannot help it.  Truth is truth; and so I answer, in a low voice: