Louis talked vigorously of Virginia and Louisa-secretly marvelling how his hosts had brought themselves down to such fare. Isabel was dining without apparently seeing anything amiss, and James attempted nothing but a despairing toss of his chin, as he pronounced the carrots underdone. After the first course there was a long interval, during which Isabel and Louis composedly talked about the public meeting which he had been attending, and James fidgetted in the nervousness of hardly-restrained displeasure; but suddenly a frightful shrieking arose, and he indignantly cried, 'That girl!'
'Poor Charlotte in her hysterics again,' said Isabel, moving off, quickly for her, with the purple scent-bottle at her chatelaine.
'Isabel makes her twice as bad,' exclaimed James; 'to pet her with eau-de-Cologne is mere nonsense. Some day I shall throw a bucket of cold water over her.'
Isabel had left the door open, and they heard her softly comforting Charlotte with 'Never mind,' and 'Lord Fitzjocelyn would not care,' till the storm lulled. Charlotte crept off to her room, and Isabel returned to the dinner- table.
'Well, what's the matter now?' said James.
'Poor Charlotte!' said Isabel, smiling; 'it seems that she trusted to making a grand appearance with the remains of yesterday's pudding, and that she was quite overset by the discovery that Ellen and Miss Catharine had been marauding on them.'
'You don't mean that Kitty has been eating that heavy pudding at this time of night?' cried James.
'Kitty eats everything,' was the placid answer, 'and I do not think we can blame Ellen, for she often comes down after our dinner to find something for the nursery supper.'
'Things go on in the most extraordinary manner,' muttered James.
'I suppose Charlotte misses Jane,' said Louis. 'She looks ill.'
'No wonder,' said James, 'she is not strong enough for such work. She has no method, and yet she is the only person who ever thinks of doing a thing properly. I wish your friend Madison would come home and take her off our hands, for she is always alternating between fits of novel-reading and of remorse, in which she nearly works herself to death with running after lost time.'
'I should be sorry to part with her,' said Isabel; 'she is so quiet, and so fond of the children.'
'She will break down some day,' said James; 'if not before, certainly when she hears that Madison has a Peruvian wife.'
'There is no more to come,' said Isabel, rising; 'shall we come upstairs?'
James took up the candles, and Louis followed, considerably hungry, and for once provoked by Isabel's serene certainty that nobody cared whether there were anything to eat. However, he had forgotten all by the time he came upstairs, and began to deliver a message from Lady Conway, that she was going to write in a day or two to beg for a visit from Isabel during her sojourn at Estminster, a watering-place about thirty miles distant. Isabel's face lighted with pleasure. 'I could go?' she said, eagerly turning towards James.
'Oh, yes, if you wish it,' he answered, gruffly, as if vexed at her gratification.
'I mean, of course, if you can spare me,' she said, with an air of more reserve.
'If you wish it, go by all means. I hope you will.'
'The Christmas holidays are so near, that we may both go,' said Isabel; but James still had not recovered his equanimity, and Louis thought it best to begin talking of other things; and, turning to James, launched into the results of his Inglewood crops, and the grand draining plan which was to afford Marksedge work for the winter, and in which his father had become much interested. But he did not find that ready heed to all that occupied him of which he used to be certain at the Terrace. Isabel cared not at all for farming, and took no part in 'mere country squire's talk;' and James was too much overburthened with troubles and anxieties to enter warmly into those of others. Of those to whom Louis's concerns had been as their own, one had been taken from him, the other two were far away; and the cold 'yes,' 'very good,' fell coldly on his ear.
The conversation reverted to the school; and here it appeared that two years' experience had taken away the freshness of novelty, and the cycle of disappointment had begun. More boys were quitting the school than the new-comers could balance; and James spoke with acute vexation of the impracticability of the boys, and the folly of the parents. The attendance at his evening lectures had fallen off; and he declared that there was a spirit of opposition to whatever he did. The boys disobeyed, knowing that they should be favoured at home, and if they were punished, the parents talked of complaints to the trustees. The Sunday teaching was treated as especially obnoxious: the genteel mothers talked ridiculously about its resembling a charity-school, the fathers did not care whether their sons went or not, and he had scarcely five boys who appeared there regularly, and of them one was the butcher's son, who came rather in spite of his parents than with their consent. Attendance at church was more slack than ever; and when he lectured the defaulters, and gave them additional tasks in the week, it was resented as an injustice. To crown all, Mr. Ramsbotham had called, and had been extremely insolent about a boy whose ears had been boxed for reading Pickwick in school, under cover of his Latin grammar, and Isabel was almost indignant with Miss Faithfull for having ventured to hint to her that she wished Mr. Frost would be a little more gentle with the boys.
Isabel was fully alive now, and almost as vehement as her husband, in her complaints against his many foes. There was no lack of sympathy here, indeed, there might be rather too much, for she did not afford the softening influence that James had hitherto found at home.
'Well, Jem,' said Louis, at last, 'I think you should keep your hands off the boys.'
'You are not bitten with the nonsense about personal dignity and corporal punishment?' said James.
'By no means. I have an infinite respect for the great institution of flogging; but a solemn execution is one thing, a random stroke another.'
'Theories are very good things till you come to manage two score dunces without sense or honour. There is only one sort of appeal to their feelings that tells.'
'Maybe so, but I have my doubts whether you are the man to make it.'
Louis was sorry he had so spoken, for a flush of pain came up in James's face at the remembrance of what Fitzjocelyn had long ago forgotten-a passionate blow given to deter him from a piece of wilful mischief, in which he was persisting for the mere amusement of provoking. It stood out among all other varieties of cuff, stroke, and knock, by the traces it had left, by Mrs. Frost's grief at it, and the forgiveness from the Earl, and it had been the most humiliating distress of James's childhood. It humbled him even now, and he answered-
'You may be right, Louis; I may be not sufficiently altered since I was a boy. I have struck harder than I intended more than once, and I have told the boys so.'
'I am sure, if they had any generosity, they would have been touched with your amends,' cried Isabel.
'After all, a schoolmaster's life does not tend to mend the temper,' concluded James, sighing, and passing his hand over his forehead.
'No,' thought Louis, 'nor does Isabel's mutton!'
CHAPTER XIII. THE CONWAY HOUSEHOLD.
And ye shall walk in silk attire, And siller hae to spare, Gin ye'll consent to be his bride, Nor think of Donald mair. Miss BLAMIRE.
What makes you so lame to-day?' asked Lord Ormersfield, as Louis crossed the library, on returning from an interview to which he had been summoned in another room.
'I only stumbled over an obstruction on the Frost staircase yesterday,' aaid Louis. 'Poor Jem chose to have me up to the nursery; and to see him in the paternal character is the funniest as well as the pleasantest spectacle the house affords.'
'Ah! it is not what it was,' said the Earl. 'I suppose I must call there before the holidays, though,' he added, reluctantly. 'But what did that man, Ramsbotham, want with you?'
'To ask our interest for that appointment for his friend Grant.'
'Indeed! what could bring him here?'
'Why, unluckily, he fancied he had some claim on me, on the score of Jem Frost's election. I was too innocent then to know what those things go for.'
'You may say so!' ejaculated the Earl. 'So he was insolent enough to bring that up, was he?'
'Worse,' said Fitzjocelyn; 'he wanted to threaten that, unless I would oblige him now, there were matters
