He advanced from behind the screen.

"Major! My most humble apologies! I never thought of you being here! I
was showing that boy and girl of mine some of your beautiful things."

Major Talbot-Lowry was unlike his daughter Judith in many things, and
not least in his easy sufferance of those whom she, in youthful
arrogance, called cads.

"Come in, Doctor, and have a cigar in peace," he said, hospitably,
putting on one side the novel he was reading. "I thought you were
Evans, or one of the maids, coming to bother me. This damned show has
turned the house upside down!"

"Well, it seems a great success," said Dr. Mangan cordially.

"Very good of you to come," responded his host, "more especially when
it's--er--it's--er--such a purely local affair--"

Dr. Mangan understood that he was receiving the meed of religious
tolerance.

"Well, Major," he said, expansively, "I lived long enough one time in
England to learn that we mustn't give in too much to the clerical
gentlemen! My own instinct is to be neighbourly, and to let my friends
mind their own religion."

"Quite so, quite so," said Major Dick, magnanimously, forgetting, for
the moment, those epithets that, in his more heated moments, he was
accustomed to apply to the ministers of the Church to which he did not