Breakfast was never a lively meal at the Lodge. After the first few days
Dr. Grey took refuge in his big book, which for years Miss Gascoigne
averred he had always kept beside him at meal-times. Not good
behavior in a paterfamilias, but the habit told its own tale. Very soon
Christian neither marveled at nor blamed him.

Never in all her life, not even during the few months that she lived with
the Fergusons, had she sat at a family table; yet she had always had a
favorite ideal of what a family table ought to be--bright, cheerful, a sort
of domestic altar, before which every one cast down his or her offering,
great or small, of pleasantness and peace; where for at least a brief
space in the day all annoyances were laid aside, all stormy tempers
hushed, all quarrels healed; everyone being glad and content to sit
down at the same board, and eat the same bread and salt, making it,
whether it were a fatted calf or a dinner of herbs, equally a joyful,
almost sacramental meal.

This was her ideal, poor girl! Now she wondered as she had done
many times since her coming "home," if all family tables were like this
one--shadowed over with gloomy looks, frozen by silence, or broken
by sharp speeches, which darted about like little arrows pointed with
poison, or buzzed here and there like angry wasps, settling and stinging
unawares, and making every one uncomfortable, not knowing who
might be the next victim stung. True, there was but one person to sting,
for Miss Grey never said ill-natured things; but then she said ill-advised
and _mal-apropos_ things, and she had such an air of frightened
dumbness, such a sad, deprecatory look, that she was sometimes quite
as trying as Miss Gascoigne, who spoke out. And oh, how she did
speak! Christian, who had never known many women, and had never
lived constantly with any, now for the first time learned what was