“A capital place!” exclaimed Ascott, eagerly.  “And I’ll take and settle you there:  and we’ll order supper, and make a jolly night of it.  All right.  Drive on, cabby.”

He jumped on the box, and then looked in mischievously, flourishing his lit cigar and shaking his long hair—­his Aunt Selina’s two great abominations—­right in her indignant face:  but withal looking so merry and good tempered that she shortly softened into a smile.

“How handsome the boy is growing!”

“Yes,” said Johanna, with a slight sigh; “and did you notice? how exceedingly like his—­”

The sentence was left unfinished.  Alas! if every young man, who believes his faults and follies injure himself alone, could feel what it must be, years afterward, to have his nearest kindred shrink from saying as the saddest, most ominous thing they could say of his son, that the lad is growing “so like his father!”

It might have been—­they assured each other that it was—­only the incessant roll, roll of the street sounds below their windows, which kept the Misses Leaf awake half the night of this their first night in London.  And when they sat down to breakfast—­having waited an hour vainly for their nephew—­it might have been only the gloom of the little parlor which cast a slight shadow over them all.  Still the shadow was there.

It deepened despite the sunshiny morning into which the last night’s rain had brightened till Holborn Bars looked cheerful, and Holborn pavement actually clean, so that, as Elizabeth said, “you might eat your dinner off it;” which was the one only thing she condescended to approve in London.  She had sat all evening mute in her corner, for Miss Leaf would not send her away into the terra incognita of a London hotel.  Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence of what he called a “skeleton at the feast,” had afterward got over it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity about his plans and intentions—­how he meant to take a house, he thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them:  how he would put up the biggest of brass plates, with “Mr. Leaf, surgeon.” and soon get an extensive practice, and have all his aunts to live with him.  And his aunts had smiled and listened, forgetting all about the silent figure in the corner, who perhaps had gone to sleep, or had also listened.

“Elizabeth, come and look out at London.”

So she and Miss Hilary whiled away another heavy three quarters of an hour in watching and commenting on the incessantly shifting crowd which swept past Holborn Bars.  Miss Selina sometimes looked out too, but more often sat fidgeting and wondering why Ascott did not come; while Miss Leaf, who never fidgeted, became gradually more and more silent.  Her eyes were fixed on the door, with an expression which, if Hilary could have remembered so far back, would have been to her something not painfully new, but still more