ted the needs of all her children;
though the youth of the rest--save the eldest girl, whose music lessons
had meant a battle, and whose growing attractiveness for the boys of the
district, and one in particular, was presently to mean another--made as
yet but small demands. In one question, however, periodically fruitful
of argument, even the youngest was becoming interested,--the question of
the visits to the household of the various friends and playmates of the
children. To these, it must be admitted, James Mesurier was apt to be
hardly less of a figure of fear than to his own children; for, apart
from the fact that such inroads from without were apt to disturb his few
quiet evening hours with rollicking and laughter, he, being entirely
unsocial in his own nature, had a curious idea that the family should be
sufficient to itself, and that the desire for any form of entertainment
outside it was a sign of dissatisfaction with God's gifts of a good
home, and generally a frivolity to be discouraged.

As a boy he had grown up without companions, and as a man had remained
lonely, till he had met in his wife the one comrade of his days. What
had been good enough for their father should be good enough for his
children, was a formula which he applied all round to their bringing up,
curiously forgetful, for a man at heart so just, of the pleasure one
would have expected it to be to make sure that the errors of his own
training were not repeated in that of his offspring. But, indeed, there
was in him constitutionally something of the Puritan suspicion of, and
aversion from, pleasure, which it had never occurred to him to consider
as the end of, or, indeed, as a considerable element of existence. Life
was somehow too serious for play, spiritually as well as materially; and
much work and a little rest was the eternal and, on the whole, salutary
lot of man.

Such were some of the conditions among which the young Mesuriers found
themselves, and of which their impatience had become momentously
explosive this February evening.

For some days there had been an energetic simmer of rebellion among the
four elder children against a new edict of early rising which was surely
somewhat arbitrary. Early rising was one of James Mesurier's articles of
faith; and he was always up and dressed by half-past six, though there
was no breakfast till eight, and absolutely no necessity for his rising
at that hour beyond his own desire. There was still