xercise.
Usually I am delighted when the sermon is ended. Even Barrow or Jeremy
Taylor would sound dull and stale if fired off in a flat, fierce
monotone, without emphasis or modulation. To-night, at every page that
turns, my heart declines lower and lower down. It is ended now; so is
the short prayer that follows it. We all rise, and father stands with
his hawk-eyes fixed on the servants, as they march out, _counting_ them.
The upper servants are all right; so are the housemaids, cookmaids, and
lesser scullions. Alas! alas! there is a helper wanting.

Having listened to and _dis_believed the explanation of his absence,
father leads the way into supper, but the little incident has taken the
bloom off his suavity.

Sir Roger has deposited the bag--still wrapped in its paper
coverings--on a chair, in a modest and unobtrusive corner of the
dining-room, ready for presentation. He did this just before prayers. As
we enter the room, father's eyes fall on it.

"What is _that_?" he cries, pointing with his forefinger, and turning
severely to the boys. "How many times have I told you that I will not
have parcels left about, littering the whole place? Off with it!"

"If you please, father," say I, in a very small and starved voice, "it
is not the boys', it is _mine_."

"_Yours_, is it?" with a sudden change of tone, and return to amenity.
"Oh, all right!" (Then, with a little accent of sudden jocosity)--"One
of your foreign purchases, eh?"

We sit round the snowy table, in the pleasant light of the shaded lamps,
eating chicken-salad, and abasing and rifling the great red pyramids of
strawberries and raspberries, but talking not much. We young ones never
_can_ talk out loud before father. He has never heard our voices raised
much above a whisper. I do not think he has an idea what fine, loud,
Billingsgate voices his children _really_ have. He has said grace--we
always have a longer, _gratefuller_ grace than usual on Sundays--and has
risen to go.

"Now for it!" cries Bobby, wildly excited, and giving me an awful dig in
the ribs with his elbow.

"Shall I get it?" asks the general, in an encouraging whisper. "Cheer
up, Nancy! do not look so _white_! it is all right."

He rises and fetches it, slips it quickly out of its coverings, and puts
it into my hand. Father has reached the door, I run after him.

"Father!" cry I, in a choked and trembling voice. "Stop!"

He turns with the handle in his grasp, and looks at me in som