gy, who was not an artist, said, "Oh, Peter darling, how sweet of you!
Now I really _can_ pay the butcher; I've had to hide from him the last
few mornings, in the coal-hole. You dear child, I hope you won't miss
that nice cup too much. When our ship comes in you shall have another."

"_When_," sighed Hilary, who was feeling over-worked that evening. (He
did advertisement pictures for a weekly paper; a sordid and degrading
pursuit.)

"Well," said Peggy hopefully, "the boarders we have now really do pay
their rent the way they never did in Venice. That's such a comfort. If
only Larry's cough gets off his chest without turning to bronchitis,
I will be quite happy. But these loathsome fogs! And that odious man
coming round wanting to know why aren't the children attending school!
'I'm sure,' I said to him, 'I wish they were; the house would be the
quieter missing them; but their father insists on educating them himself,
because he won't let them mix up with the common children in the school;
they're by way of being little gentry, do you see,' I said, 'though
indeed you mightn't think it to look at them.' Oh dear me, he was so
impolite; he wouldn't believe that Hilary was doing his duty by them,
though I assured him that he read them all the 'Ancient Mariner'
yesterday morning while they watched him dress, and that I was teaching
them the alphabet whenever I had a spare minute. But nothing would
satisfy him; and off the two eldest must go to the Catholic school next
week to be destroyed by the fog and to pick up with all the ragamuffins
in the district."

"An abominable, cast-iron system," Hilary murmured mechanically. "Of a
piece with all the other institutions of an iniquitous state."

"And what do you think," added Peggy, who was busy putting a patch in
Silvio's knickerbockers, "Guy Vyvian turned up out of nowhere and called
this afternoon, bad manners to him for a waster. When he found you were
out, Hilary, he asked where was Rhoda; he'd no notion of sitting down to
listen to _me_ talking. Rhoda was out at work too, of course; I told him
it wasn't most of us could afford to play round in the afternoons the way
he did. I suppose he'll come again, bothering and upsetting the child
just when she's settling down a bit. I've thought her seeming brighter
lately; she likes going about with you, Peter. But there'll be pretty
doings again when that man comes exciting her."

"Vyvian is a cad and a low fellow," Hilary said, "an