e red-haired boy. If I could only manage to speak out
after breakfast!"

It was not without satisfaction that he remembered that he paid extra
for "meat for breakfast" in his son's school-bills, for he was beginning
to look forward to meal-time with the natural desire of a young and
healthy frame for nourishment.

At eight o'clock the Doctor came in and announced breakfast, leading
the way himself to what was known in the school as the "Dining Hall." It
scarcely deserved so high-sounding a name perhaps, being a long low room
on the basement floor, with a big fireplace, fitted with taps, and
baking ovens, which provoked the suspicion that it had begun existence
as a back kitchen.

The Doctor took his seat alone at a cross table forming the top of one
of the two rows of tables, set with white cups and saucers, and plates
well heaped with the square pieces of bread and butter, while Mrs.
Grimstone with Dulcie and Tom, sat at the foot of the same row, behind
two ugly urns of dull block-tin.

But when Mr. Bultitude, more hungry than he had felt for years, found
his place at one of the tables, he was disgusted to find upon his
plate--not, as he had confidently expected, a couple of plump poached
eggs, with their appetising contrast of ruddy gold and silvery white,
not a crisp and crackling sausage or a mottled omelette, not even the
homely but luscious rasher, but a brace of chill forbidding sardines,
lying grim and headless in bilious green oil!

It was a fish he positively loathed, nor could it be reasonably expected
that the confidence necessary for a declaration was to be forgotten by
so sepulchral a form of nutriment.

He roused himself, however, to swallow them, together with some of the
thin and tin-flavoured coffee. But the meal as a whole was so different
from the plentiful well-cooked breakfasts he had sat down before for
years as a matter of course, that it made him feel extremely unwell.

No talking was allowed during the meal. The Doctor now and then looked
up from his dish of kidneys on toast (at which envious glances were
occasionally cast) to address a casual remark to his wife across the
long row of plates and cups, but, as a rule, the dull champing sound of
boys solemnly and steadily munching was all that broke the silence.

Towards the end, when the plates had been generally cleared, and the
boys sat staring with the stolidity of repletion at one another across
the tables, the junior house-master,