"For one is nearly blown away," he would say. "There is always a breeze through the house when that girl is in it; it is like playing a scale upside down and wrong side outwards to hear her coming downstairs;" and very often he would come to his meals with his collar up, and flourishing a red silk handkerchief ostentatiously, and speak in a croaking, nasal voice, until his father asked him mildly where he had caught such a cold; and then Waveney would nudge him furiously under the table.

On the present occasion poor Mollie was kept in durance vile until Noel had finished his disquisition on his novel symphony; then he released her, and contemplated the tea-table with a fixed and glassy stare, which conveyed mute reproach.

"Noel, dear, it is a fresh loaf," she said, hastily and apprehensively, "and it is beautifully crusty, and the butter is good—a penny a pound dearer, and at the best shop."

"Where are the shrimps?" asked Noel, and he so lengthened the word that it sounded almost as terribly in Mollie's ears as Mrs. Siddons' "Give me the dagger!" for so much depends on expression, and if one is only melodramatic, even the words "shrimps" can be as sibilant and aggressive as the hissing of snakes.

"Oh, dear, how tiresome you are, Noel!" returned Mollie, quite sharply for her, for she was housekeeper, and the strain and responsibility were overwhelming at times, especially when her poor little purse was empty. "I could not afford them, really, Noel," she continued, welling into tenderness at the thought of his disappointment. "There were some nice brown ones, but I dared not get them, for I had only twopence left, so I bought watercresses instead."

"Ask a blessing, my child, and I will forgive you;" and then, much to his sister's relief, Noel subsided, and began cutting the bread, while under cover of the table-cloth, Waveney slipped sixpence into Mollie's hand, and made a movement with her lips suggestive of "to-morrow;" and Mollie nodded as she poured out the tea.

Noel had a volume of "Eugene Aram" propped up before him as he ate, but it did not engross him so utterly that he could not interpolate the conversation whenever he pleased, and it pleased him to do so very often.

Mollie was giving a graphic and heart-breaking account of the way in which she and her father had packed the precious picture, "and how it had been bumped three times while they carried it down the narrow stairs." "I quite missed the dear old thing, Wave," 

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