tudying her?'

'Now, you know 'tis holiday time, and volunteer work; besides, she was
waiting for you, and I could not help doing this.' She held out a
hand, which was scarcely needed, and Mary sprang lightly to share her
perch upon the wall. 'Look here!'

'Am I to guess the subject as in the game of historic outlines,' said
Miss Nugent, as the book was laid on her lap. 'It looks like a
modern--no, a mediaeval--edition of Marcus Curtius about to leap into
the capital opening for a young man, only with his dogs instead of his
horse. That hound seems very rationally to object.'

'Now don't! Guess in earnest.'

'A compliment to your name. The Boy of Egremont, poor fellow, just
about to bound across the strid.'

'Exactly! I always feel sure that my father must have done something
like this.'

'Was it so heroic?' said Miss Mary. 'You know it was for the hundredth
time, and he had no reason to expect any special danger.'

'Oh, but his mother was waiting, and he had to go. Now, I'll tell you
how it must have been with my father. You know he sailed away in a
yacht before I was born, and poor mother never saw him again; but I
know what happened. There was a ship on fire like the Birkenhead, and
the little yacht went near to pick up the people, and my father called
out, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert--

"Do not fear, Heaven is as near
By water as by land."

And the little yacht was so close when the great ship blew up that it
got sucked down in the whirlpool, and rescuers and all died a noble
death together!'

'Has your mother been telling you?' asked Miss Mary.

'Oh no! she never mentions him. She does not know. No one does; but I
am quite sure he died nobly, with no one to tell the tale, only the
angels to look on, and that makes it all the finer. Or just suppose he
was on a desert island all the time, and came back again to find us! I
sometimes think he is.'

'What? When you are _quite sure_ of the other theory?'

'I mean I am quite sure while I am thinking about it, or reading
Robinson Crusoe, or the Swiss Family.'

'Oh!'

'Miss Mary, has no one ever told you anything about my father?'

'No one.'

'They never tell me. Mother cries, and aunt Ursula puts on her
"there's-an-end-of-it look." Do you think there is anything they are
waiting to tell me till I am older?'

'If there were, I am sure you had better not try to find it out
beforehand.'

'You don't think I would