ngs about him which he had expressed to his sisters, he
walked up and down the room. It too would have to change, like them, to
acknowledge that he was master, to be moulded to new requirements. He
felt as if the poor old ugly furniture, the hard curtains that hung like
pieces of painted wood, the dingy pictures on the walls, contemplated
him with pain and disapproval. They were easier to deal with than the
human furniture; but he had been accustomed to them all his life, and it
was not without a sense of impiety that the young iconoclast contemplated
these grim household gods, harmless victims of that future which as
yet was but an audacious dream. He was standing in front of the great
chiffonnier, with its marble top and plate-glass back, looking with
daring derision at its ugliness, when old Joseph came in at his usual
hour--the hour at which he had fulfilled the same duty for the last
twenty years--to put out the lamps. Warrender could horrify the girls and
insult the poor old familiar furniture, but he was not yet sufficiently
advanced to defy Joseph. He turned round, with a blush and quick movement
of shame, as if he had been found out, at the appearance of the old man
with his candle in his hand, and murmuring something about work, hurried
off to the library, with a fear that even that refuge might perhaps be
closed upon him. Joseph remained master of the situation. He followed
Warrender to the door with his eyes, with a slight contemptuous shrug of
his shoulders, as at an unaccountable being whose "ways" were scarcely
important enough to be taken into account, and trotted about, putting
out one lamp after another, and the twinkling candles on the mantelpiece,
and the little lights in the hall and corridor. It was an office Joseph
liked. He stood for a moment at the foot of the back stairs looking with
complacency upon the darkness, his candle lighting up his little old wry
face. But when his eye caught the line of light under the library door,
Joseph shook his head. He had put the house to bed without disturbance
for so long: he could not abide, he said to himself, this introduction
of new ways.

CHAPTER VIII.

It was a violent beginning; but perhaps it was as well, on the whole,
that the idea of Theo's future supremacy should have been got into the
heads of the duller portion of the family. Warrender was so anxious that
there should be no unnecessary haste in his mother's departure, and
so ready to fin