inutes will make it as good as
new--at least" (casting a disparaging eye over its frayed and
taffy-marked surface), "as good as it ever will be in this world."

A little pause.

"I suppose I have lost my way," he says, thinking, I fancy, that I look
rather eager to be gone. "I am never very good at the geography of a
strange house."

"Yes," say I, promptly; "you came through _our_ door, instead of your
own; shall I show you the way back?"

"Since I have come so far, may not I come a little farther?" he asks,
glancing rather longingly at the half-open school-room door, whence
sounds of pious mirth are again beginning to reissue.

"Do you mean _really_?" ask I, with a highly-dissuasive inflection of
voice. "Please not to-night; we are all higgledy-piggledy--at sixes and
sevens! To tell you the truth, we have been _cooking_. I wonder you did
not smell it in the drawing-room."

Again he looks amused.

"May not I cook too? I _can_, though you look disbelieving; there are
few people that can beat me at an Irish stew when I set my mind to it."

A head (Bobby's) appears round the school-room door.

"I say, Nancy, who are you colloquing with out there? I believe you have
got hold of our future benefact--"

An "oh!" of utter discomfiture, and the head is withdrawn.

"I am keeping you," Sir Roger says. "Well, I will say good-night. You
will shake hands, won't you, to show that you bear no malice?"

"That I will," reply I, heartily stretching out my right hand, and
giving his a cordial shake. For was not he at school with father?

CHAPTER III.

Day has followed night. The broiled smell has at length evacuated the
school-room, but a good deal of taffy, spilt in the pouring out, still
adheres to the carpet, making it nice and sticky. The wind is still
running roughly about over the earth, and the yellow crocuses, in the
dark-brown garden-borders, opened to their widest extent, are staring up
at the sun. How _can_ they stare so straight up at him without blinking?
I have been trying to emulate them--trying to stare, too, up at him,
through the pane, as he rides laughing, aloft in the faint far sky; and
my presumptuous eyes have rained down tears in consequence. I am trying
now to read; but a hundred thousand things distract me: the sun shining
warm on my shoulder, as I lean against the window; the divine morning
clamor of the birds; their invitations to come out that will take no
nay; and last, but oh! not, _n