o to
church, but was always regular at chapel.

On this she observed coldly that she was sorry to hear her nephew was a
Dissenter; and Flushington was much too shy to attempt to explain the
misunderstanding; he sat quiet and felt miserable, while there was
another uncomfortable pause.

The cousins were whispering together and laughing over little private
jokes, and he, after the manner of sensitive men, of course imagined
they were laughing at him--and perhaps he was not very far wrong on
this occasion. So he was growing hotter and hotter every second,
inwardly cursing his whole race and wishing that his father had been a
foundling--when there came another tap at the door.

"Why, that must be poor old Sophy!" said his aunt. "Fred, you remember
old Sophy--no, you can't; you were only a baby when she came to live
with us, but she'll remember you. She begged so hard to be taken, and
so we told her she might come on here slowly after us."

And then an old person in a black bonnet came feebly in, and was
considerably affected when she saw Flushington. "To think," she
quavered, "to think as my dim old eyes should see the child I've nursed
on my lap growed out into a college gentleman!" And she hugged
Flushington and wept on his shoulder till he was almost cataleptic with
confusion.

But as she grew calmer she became more critical; she confessed to a
certain feeling of disappointment with Flushington; he had not filled
out, she said, "so fine as he'd promised to fill out." And when she
asked if he recollected how he wouldn't be washed unless they put his
little wooden horse on the washstand, and what a business it was to
make him swallow his castor-oil, it made Flushington feel like a fool.

This was quite bad enough, but at last the girls began to go round his
rooms, exclaiming at everything, admiring his pipe and umbrella racks,
his buffalo horns and his quaint wooden kettle-holder, until they
happened to come upon his French novel; and, being unsophisticated
colonial girls with a healthy ignorance of such literature, they wanted
Flushington to tell them what it was all about.

His presence of mind had gone long before, and this demand threw him
into a violent perspiration; he could not invent, and he was painfully
racking his brains to find some portion of the tale which would bear
repetition--when there was another knock at the door.

At this Flushington was perfectly dumb with horror; he prepared himself
b