o
impress them upon your mind. I cannot accept that excuse as a good and
sufficient one.

"And, tell me honestly, are you not, as I strongly suspect, less careful
to obey your father's orders when he is away, so that you feel yourself
in a measure out of his reach, than when he is close at hand?"

"Papa, you ask such hard questions," she said.

"Hard to my little daughter only because of her own wrong-doing. But
hard or easy, they must be answered. Tell me the truth, would you not
have been more careful to keep within prescribed bounds last night if I
had been at home, or you had known that you would see me here to-day?"

"Yes, papa," she answered, in a low, unwilling tone. "I don't think
anybody else can have quite so much authority over me as you, and--and
so I do, I suppose, act a little more as if I could do as I please when
you are away."

"And that after I have explained to you again and again that in my
absence you are quite as much under the authority of the kind friends
with whom I have placed you as under mine when I am with you. I see
there is no effectual way to teach you the lesson but by punishing you
for disregarding it."

Then he made her give him a detailed account of her ramble of the night
before and its consequences.

When she had gone as far in the narrative as her safe arrival among the
alarmed household, he asked whether her Grandma Elsie inflicted any
punishment upon her.

"No, sir," answered Lulu, hanging her head and speaking in a sullen
tone. "I told her I didn't feel as if anybody had any right to punish me
but you."

"Lulu I did you dare to talk in that way to her?" exclaimed the captain.
"I hope she punished you for your impertinence; for if she did not I
certainly must."

"She lectured me then, and this morning told me my punishment was a
prohibition against wandering away from the rest more than just a few
yards.

"But, papa, they were all so unkind to me at breakfast--I mean all but
Grandma Elsie and Mamma Vi and Gracie. Betty looked sneering, and the
others so cold and distant, and Rosie said something very insulting
about my being a bad, troublesome child and frightening Mamma Vi into a
headache."

"Certainly no more than you deserved," her father said. "Did you bear
it with patience and humility, as you ought?"

"Do you mean that I must answer you, papa?"

"Most assuredly I do; tell me at once exactly what you did and said."

"I don't want to, papa," she said, hal