family, to whom, as to all young creatures, it seemed
natural that _they_ should be the first objects; and as they were a
great trouble and burden to him, perhaps the children did not always
bear their most amiable aspect to their father. Both looked selfish to
the other, and Mr. May, no doubt, could have made out quite as good a
case as the children did. He thought all young people were selfish,
taking everything they could, trying to extract even the impossible from
the empty purse and strained patience of their elders; and they thought
that he was indifferent to them, thinking about himself, as it is a
capital sin in a parent to do; and both of them were right and both
wrong, as indeed may be said in every case to which there are two sides.

"Ursula has come!" cried the two little ones. Amy and Robin could read
their father's face better than they could read those instruments of
torture called printed books, and they saw that he was in a good humour,
and that they were safe to venture upon the playful liberty of seizing
him, one by each hand, and dragging him in. He was a tall man, and the
sight of him triumphantly dragged in by these imps, the youngest of whom
was about up to his knees, was pretty, and would have gone to the heart
of any spectator. He was not himself unconscious of this, and when he
was in a good humour, and the children were neat and tolerably dressed,
he did not object to being seen by the passers-by dragged up his own
steps by those two little ones. The only passers-by, however, on this
occasion were a retired shopkeeper and his wife, who had lately bought
one of the oldest houses in Grange Lane, and who had come out for a walk
as the day was fine. "Mark my words, Tozer," the lady was saying,
"that's a good man though he's a church parson. Them as children hangs
onto like that, ain't got no harm in them."

"He's a rum un, he is," said Mr. Tozer in reply. It was a pity that the
pretty spectacle of the clergyman with his little boy and girl should
have been thus thrown away upon a couple of Dissenters, yet it was not
without its effect. Amy pulled one arm and Robin pulled the other. They
were dark-haired children like all the Mays, and as this peculiarity is
rare among children, it gave these two a certain piquancy.

"Well, well," he said, "take me to Ursula," and after he had kissed his
newly-arrived daughter, he sat down in the faded drawing-room with much
geniality, and took one child on each