himsically.

"Lady is reading Pater to me for the good of my soul, and I am listening
politely for the good of her manners," she answered. "But it is a little
wearing for us both, for she knows I don't understand it, and I know she
thinks me a little dishonest for pretending to."

"Mother!"

The girl's gray eyes opened wide above her cool, creamy cheeks; the
deep dimples that made her mother's face so girlish actually added a
regularity and seriousness to the daughter's soft chin. Her chestnut
hair was thick and straight, the little half-curls of the same rich tint
that fell over her mother's forehead brushed wavelessly back on each
side of a deep widow's peak.

The two older ones laughed.

"Always uncompromising, Lady Jane!" the colonel cried.

"I assure you, colonel, when Lady begins to mark iniquities, few of us
stand!"

Jane smiled gravely, as on two children. "You know very well that is
nonsense," she said.

Black Hannah appeared in the door, beaming and curtsying to the colonel.

"You-all ready foh yoh tea, Miss Lady?" she inquired.

A sudden recollection threw Mrs. Leroy into one of her irresistible fits
of gentle laughter.

"Oh, Lady," she murmured, "do you remember that impossible creature that
lectured me about Hannah's asking you for orders? Did I tell you about
it, colonel?"

Jane shook her head reprovingly.

"Now, mother dearest, you always make him out worse--"

"Worse, my darling? Worse is a word that couldn't be applied to that
man. Worse is comparative. Positive he certainly was, superlative is
mild, but comparative--never!"

"Tell about it, do," begged the guest.

"Well, he came to see how Lady was growing up--he's a sort of species of
relative--and he sat in your chair, colonel, and talked the most amazing
Fourth Reader platitudes in a deep bass voice. And when Hannah asked
Lady what her orders were for the grocer, he gave me a terrible look and
rumbled out: 'I am grieved to see, Cousin Alice, that Jennie has burst
her bounds!'

"It sounded horribly indecorous--I expected to see her in fragments on
the floor--and I fairly gasped."

"Gasped, mother? You laughed in his face!"

"Did I, dearest? It is possible." Mrs. Leroy admitted. "And when I
looked vague he explained, 'I mean that you seem to have relinquished
the reins very early, Cousin Alice!'

"'Relinquished? Relinquished?' said I. 'Why, dear me, Mr. Wadham, I
never held 'em!'"

"He only meant, mother dear, that--"

"