hat
making a bull."

Rupert's sense of humour was as keen as most of his other faculties,
and at the unconscious humour of this sally his laugh rang out
frankly, while Molly and Madeleine giggled in their plates, and Miss
O'Donoghue chuckled quietly to herself in the intervals of eating and
drinking, content to have been witty, without troubling to discover
how.

Sophia alone remained unmoved by mirth; indeed, as she raised her
drooping head, amazed at the clamour, an unwary tear trickled down her
long nose into her tea. She was given to revelling in anniversaries of
dead and gone joys or sorrows; the one as melancholy to her to look
back upon as the other; and upon this November day, now very many
years ago, had the ardent, consumptive rector first hinted at his
love.

"And now," said Miss O'Donoghue, who, having disposed of the most
serious part of the breakfast, pushed away her plate with one hand
while she stirred her second cup of well-creamed tea lazily with the
other, "Now, Rupert, will you tell me the arrangements you propose to
make to enable me to see your good brother?"

Rupert had anticipated being attacked upon this subject, and had fully
prepared himself to defend the peculiar position it was his interest
to maintain. To encourage a meeting between his brother and the old
lady (to whom the present position of affairs was a grievous offence)
did not, certainly, enter into his plan of action; but Tanty had put
the question in an unexpected and slightly awkward shape, and for a
second or two he hesitated before replying.

"I fear," said he then, gliding into the subject with his usual easy
fluency, "that you will be disappointed if you have been reckoning
upon an interview with Adrian, my dear aunt. The hermit will not be
drawn from his shell on any pretext."

"What," cried Tanty, while her withered cheek flushed, "do you mean to
tell me that my nephew, Sir Adrian Landale, will decline to come a few
hundred yards to see his old aunt--his mother's own sister--who has
come three hundred miles, at seventy years of age, to see him in his
own house--_in his own house_?" repeated the irate old lady, rattling
the spoon with much emphasis against her cup. "If you _mean_ this,
Rupert, it is an insult to me which I shall never forget--_never_."

She rose from her seat as she concluded, shaking with the tremulous
anger of age.

"For God's sake, Tanty," cried Rupert, throwing into his voice all the
generous w