e surprise.

"Father!" cry I, beginning again, and holding my gift out nervously
toward him, "here's--here's--here's a _bag_!"

This is my address of presentation. I hear the boys tittering at the
table behind me--a sound which, telling me how ill I am speeding, makes
my confusion tenfold worse. I murmur, helplessly and indistinctly,
something about his never traveling, and my knowing that fact--and
having been always sure that he would hate it--and then I glance
helplessly round with a wild idea of flight. But at the same moment an
arm of friendly strength comes round my shoulders--a friendly voice
sounds in my buzzing ears.

"James," it says, simply and directly, "she has brought you a present,
and she is afraid that you will not care about it."

"A _present_!" echoes my father, the meaning of the inexplicable object
which has suddenly been thrust into his grasp beginning to dawn upon
him. "Oh, I see! I am sure, my dear Nancy"--with a sort of embarrassed
stiffness that yet means to be gracious--"that I am extremely obliged to
you, extremely; and though I regret that you should have wasted your
money on me--yet--yet--I assure you, I shall always prize it very
highly."

Then he goes out rather hastily. I return to the supper-table.

"Shake hands!" cries Algy, pouring me out a glass of claret. "_Now_,
perhaps, you have some faint idea of what _I_ felt when I had to return
thanks for the bridesmaids."

"Nancy!" cries Bobby, holding out the fruit to which he alludes, and
speaking in a wobbly, quivering voice, with a painfully _literal_
imitation of my late address, "here's--here's--here's a _peach_!"

But I am burying my face in Sir Roger's shoulder, like a shy child.

"I _like_ you!" I say, creeping up quite close to him. "You were the
only one that came to help me. If it had not been for _you_, I should be
there still!"

CHAPTER XVII.

The bag-affair is quite an old one now--a fortnight old. The bag itself
has, I believe, retired into the decent privacy of a cupboard, nor is it
much more likely to reissue thence than was one of the frail nuns built
into the wall in the old times likely to come stepping out again. Bobby
has at length ceased to offer me every object which it devolves upon him
to hand me, with a quavering voice and a prolonged stammer, since,
though I was at first excellently vulnerable by this weapon of offense,
I am now becoming _hornily_ hard and indifferent to it. We have stepped
o