waving, "I wish to
collect your suffrages on a certain subject. Tell me," sitting down on a
hard chair, and suddenly declining into a familiar and colloquial tone,
"have you seen any signs of derangement in father lately?"

"None more than usual," answers Algy, sarcastically, lifting his pretty,
disdainful nose out of his novel. "If, as the Eton Latin Grammar says,
_ira_ is a _brevis furor_ you, will agree with me that he is pretty
often out of his mind, in fact, a good deal oftener than he is in it."

"No, but _really_?"

"Of course not. What do you mean?"

"Put down all your books!" say I, impressively. "Listen attentively.
Bobby, stop see-sawing that chair, it makes me feel deadly sick. Ah! my
young friend, _you_ will rue the day when you kept me sitting on the top
of that wall--"

I break off.

"Go on! go on!" in five different voices of impatience.

"Well, then, father has sent a message by mother to the effect that _I_
am to dine with them to-night--_I_, if you please--_I!_--you must own"
(lengthening my neck as I speak, and throwing up my untidy flax head)
"that sweet Nancies are looking up in the world."

A silence of stupefaction falls on the assembly. After a pause--

"YOU?"

"Yes, _I!_"

"And how do you account for it?"

"I believe," reply I, simpering, "that our future benefac--, no! I
really must give up calling him that, or I shall come out with it to his
face, as Bobby did last night. Well, then, Sir Roger asked me why I did
not appear yesterday. I suppose he thought that I looked so _very_ grown
up, that they must be keeping me in pinafores by force."

Algy has risen. He is coming toward me. He has pulled me off my chair.
He has taken me by the shoulders, and is turning me round to face the
others.

"Allow me!" he says, bowing, and making me bow, too, "to introduce you
to the future legatee!--Barbara, my child, you and I are _nowhere_. This
depraved old man has clearly no feeling for symmetry of form or face; a
long career of Begums has utterly vitiated his taste. To-morrow he will
probably be clamoring for Tou Tou's company."

"Brat!" says Barbara, laughing, "where has the analogy between me and
the man who pulled up the window in the train for the old woman gone
to?"

"Mother said I was to look as nice as I could," say I, casting a rueful
glance at the tea-board, at the large plum loaf, at the preparations for
temperate conviviality. I have sat down on the threadbare blue-and-red