he family tradition of the Clintons, whereby the interests and
occupations of the women were strictly subordinated to those of the men,
had not yet availed to damp the spirits or curb the activities of Joan
and Nancy, of whom Mrs. Clinton had made a simultaneous and somewhat
belated present to the Squire thirteen years before. Frank, the sailor,
the youngest son, had been seven at the time the twins were born, and
Dick a young man at Cambridge. Joan and Nancy were still the pets of the
household, strong and healthy pets, and unruly within the limits
permitted them. Released from their schoolroom, they now came rushing
into the hall, and threw themselves on to their parents and their sister
with loud cries of welcome.

The Squire kissed them in turn--they approached him first as in duty
bound. It had taken him three or four years to get used to their
presence, and during that time he had treated them as the sort of
unaccountable plaything a woman brings into a house and a male
indulgently winks his eye at, a thing beneath his own notice, like a new
gown or a new poodle, or a new curate, but one in which she must be
permitted, in the foolish weakness of her sex, to interest herself. Then
he had gradually begun to "take notice" of them, to laugh at their
childish antics and speeches, to quote them--he had actually done this
in the hunting-field--and finally to like to have them pottering about
with him when duties of investigation took him no further than the
stables or the buildings of the home farm. He had always kept them in
order while they were with him; he had never lost sight of the fact that
they were, after all, feminine; and he had never allowed them to
interfere with his more serious pursuits. But he had fully accepted them
as agreeable playthings for his own lighter hours of leisure, just as he
might have taken to the poodle or the curate, and so treated them still,
although their healthy figures were beginning to fill out, and if they
had been born Clintons of a generation or two before they would have
been considered to be approaching womanhood.

He now greeted them with hearty affection, and told them that if they
were good girls they might come and look at the pheasants with him when
he had read his letters and they had had their tea, and then took
himself off to his library.

Mrs. Clinton's greeting was less hearty, but not less affectionate. She
lingered just that second longer over each of them which g