window, with light chairs and small writing-tables, each with its glass of flowers; the piano stood across the arc, shutting off these windows into almost a separate room; low book-cases, with chiffonier cupboards and marble tops, ran round the walls, surmounted with many artistic ornaments. The central table was crowned with a tall glass of exquisitely-arranged grasses and wild flowers, and the choice and graceful nicknacks round it were such as might be traced to a London life in the artist world, and among grateful patients.
Brackets with vases and casts here and there projected from the walls, and some charming crayons and water-colours hung round them. The plastered walls had already been marked out in panels, and a growth of frescoes of bulrushes, ivy, and leaves of all kinds was beginning to overspread them, while on a nearer inspection the leaves proved to be fast becoming peopled with living portraits of butterflies and other insects; indeed Mary started at finding herself in, as she thought, unpleasant proximity to a pair of cockchafers.
'Ah! I tell the children that we shall be suspected of putting those creatures there as a trial to the old ladies' nerves,' said Caroline, laughing.
'I confess they are startling to those who don't like creeping things! Have you many old ladies, Carey?'
'Not very many. I fancy they don't take to me more than I take to them, so we are mutually satisfied.'
'But is that a good thing?' said Mary anxiously.
'I don't know,' said Carey, indifferently. 'At least I do know,' she added, 'that I always used to be told I didn't try to make small talk, and I can do it less than ever now that it is the smallest of small, and my heart faints from it. Oh Mary!'
'My poor dear Caroline! But you say that you were told you ought to do it?'
'Well, yes. Dear granny wished it; but I think that was rather with a view to Joe's popularity, and we haven't any patients to think of now. I should think the less arrant gossip the children heard, the better.'
'But is it well to let them despise everybody?'
'Then the less they see of them, the better!'
'For shame, Carey!'
'Well, Mary, I dare say I am naughty. I do feel naughtier now than ever I did in my life; but I can't help it! It just makes me mad to be worried or tied down,' and she pushed back her hair so that her unfortunate cap was only withheld from tumbling entirely off by the pin that held it.
'Oh, that wretched cap!' she cried, jumping up, petulantly, and going to the glass to set it to rights, but with so hasty a hand that the pin became entangled in her hair, and it needed Mary's quiet hand to set it to rights; 'it's just an emblem of all the rest of it; I wouldn't wear it another day, but that I'm afraid of Ellen and Robert, and it perfectly drives me wild. And I know Joe couldn't have borne to see me in it.' At the Irishism of which she burst out laughing, and laughed herself into the tears that had never come when they were expected of her.
Mary caressed and soothed her, and told her she could well guess it was sadder to her now than even at first.
'Well, it is,' said Carey, looking up. 'If one was sent out to sea in a boat, it wouldn't be near so bad as long as one could see the dear old shore still, as when one had got out-out into the wide open-with nothing at all.'
And she stretched out her hands with a dreary, yearning gesture into the vacant space, such as it went to her friend's heart to see.
'Ah! but there's a haven at the end.'
'I suppose there is,' said Carey; 'but it's a long way off, and there's dying first, and when people want to begin about it, they get so conventional, and if there's one thing above another that I can't stand, it is being bored.'
'My poor child!'
'There, don't be angry with me, because I'm telling you just what I am!'
Before any more could be said Janet opened the door, saying, 'Mother, Emma wants to see you.'
'Oh! I forgot,' cried Carey, hurrying off, while Janet came forward to the guest in her grown-up way, and asked-
'Have you been to the Water-Colour Exhibition, Miss Ogilvie?'
'Yes; Mr. Acton took me one Saturday afternoon.'
'Oh! then he would be sure to show you Nita Ray's picture. I want so much to know how it strikes people.'
And Janet had plunged into a regular conversation about exhibitions, pictures, artists, concerts, lectures, before her mother came back, talking with all the eagerness of an exile about her native country. As a governess in her school-room, Miss Ogilvie had had little more than a key-hole view of all these things; but then what she had seen and heard had been chiefly through the Actons, and thus coincided with Janet's own side of the world, and they were in full discussion when Caroline came back.
'There, I've disposed of the butcher and baker!' she said. 'Now we can be comfortable again.'
Mary expected Janet to repair to her own lessons, or to listen to those scales which Babie might be heard from a distance playing; but she only appealed to her mother about some picture of last year, and sat down to her drawing, while the conversation on pictures and books continued in animated style. So far from sending her away, Mary fancied that Carey was rather glad to keep to surface matters, and to be prevented from another outbreak of feeling.
The next interruption was from the children, each armed with a pile of open books on the top of a slate. Carey begged Mary to wait, and went outside the window with them, sitting down under a tree whence the murmured sounds of repetition could be heard, lasting about twenty minutes between the two, and then she returned, the little ones jumping on each side of her, Armine begging that Miss Ogilvie would come and see the museum, and Barbara saying that Jock wanted to help to show it off.
'Well, run now and put your own corners tidy,' suggested their mother. 'If Jock does not stay in the playground, he will come back in a quarter of an hour.'
'And Mr. Ogilvie will come then. I invited him,' said Babie.
At which Carey laughed incredulously; but Janet, observing that she must go and see that the children did not do more harm than good, walked off, and Mary said-
'I should not wonder if he did act on the invitation.'
'I hope he will. It would have only been civil in me to have asked him, considering that I have taken possession of you,' said Caroline.
'I fully expect to see him on Miss Barbara's invitation. Do you know, Carey, he says you have transformed his school.'
'Translated it, like Bottom the Weaver.'
'In the reverse direction. He says you have made the mothers see to their boys' preparation, and wakened up the intellects.'
'Have I? I thought I had only kept my own boys up to the mark. Yes, and there's Johnny. Do you know, Mary, it is very funny, but that boy Johnny has adopted me. He comes after me everywhere like a shadow, and there's nothing he won't do for me, even learning his lessons. You see the poor boy has a good deal of native sense, Brownlow sense, and mind had been more stifled than wanting in him. Nobody had ever put things to him by the right end, and when he once let me do it for him, it was quite a revelation, and he has been so happy and prosperous that he hardly knows himself. Poor boy, there is something very honest and true about him, and so affectionate! He is a little like his uncle, and I can't help being fond of him. Then Robin is just as devoted to Jock, though I can't say the results are so very desirable, for Jock _is_ a monkey, I must confess, and it is irresistible to a monkey to have a bear that he can lead to do anything. I hear that Robin used to be the good boy of the establishment, and I am afraid he is not that now.'
'But can't you stop that?'
'My dear, nobody could think of Jock's devices so as to stop them, who had not his own monkey brain. Who would have thought of his getting the whole set to dress up as nigger singers, with black faces and banjoes, and coming to dance and sing in front of the windows?'
'There wasn't much harm in that.'
'There wouldn't have been if it had been only here. And, oh dear, the irresistible fun of Jock's capering antics, and Rob moving by mechanism, as stiff and obedient as the giant porter to Flibberti- gibbet.' Carey stopped to laugh. 'But then I never thought of their going on to present themselves to Ellen in the middle of a mighty and solemn dinner party! All the grandees, the county people (this in a deep and awful voice), sitting up in their chignons of state, in the awful pause during the dishing-up, when these five little wretches, in finery filched from the
