to more fastidious tongues. I miss in the wholesome but limited and
unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American
food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which
includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their
insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and
many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the
surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, the negro
race has come to exhibit. I was a busy lad at that meal; a speechless
one, consequently, and for some minutes so engrossed in the business
of my jaws that I did not heed the unwonted silence of the rest. Then
suddenly it came upon me as something embarrassing and painful that
Mr. and Mrs. Faringfield, who usually conversed at meals, had nothing
to say, and that Philip Winwood sat gloomy and taciturn, merely going
through a hollow form of eating. As for Fanny, she was the picture of
childish sorrow, though now tearless. Only Madge and little Tom, who
had found some joke between themselves, occasionally spluttered with
suppressed laughter, smiling meanwhile knowingly at each other.

Of course this depression was due to the absence of Ned, regarding the
cause of which his mother was still in the dark. Not missing him until
we children had filed in to supper after tidying up, she had then
remarked that he was not yet in.

"He will not be home to supper," Mr. Faringfield had replied, in a
tone that forbade questioning until the pair should be alone, and
motioning his wife to be seated at the table. After that he had once
or twice essayed to talk upon casual subjects, as if nothing had
happened, but he had perceived that the attempt was hopeless while
Mrs. Faringfield remained in her state of deferred curiosity and vague
alarm, and so he had desisted.