"No, it ain't!" Blair said quickly, emerging from behind Mrs.
Richie; "it was me made her do it."

"Well, clear out, clear out! Go to bed, both of you," Mrs.
Maitland said. But when the two children had scuttled out of the
room she struck her knee with her fist and laughed immoderately.

The next morning, when the two children skulked palely into the
dining-room, they were still frightened. Mrs. Maitland, however,
did not notice them. She was absorbed in trying in the murky
light to read the morning paper, propped against the silver urn
in front of her.

"Sit down," she said; "I don't like children who are late for
breakfast. Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, these things to our
use, and us to Thy service and glory. Amen!--Harris! Light the
gas."

Mercer's daylight was always more or less wan; but in the autumn
the yellow fogs seemed to press the low-hanging smoke down into
the great bowl of the hills at the bottom of which the town lay,
and the wanness scarcely lightened, even at high noon. On such
days the gas in the dining-room--or office, if one prefers to
call it so--flared from breakfast until dinner time. It flared
now on two scared little faces. Once Blair lifted questioning
eyebrows at Harris, and managed when the man brought his plate of
porridge to whisper, "mad?" At which the sympathetic Harris
rolled his eyes speechlessly, and the two children grew
perceptibly paler. But when, abruptly, Mrs. Maitland crumpled her
newspaper together and threw it on the floor, her absorbed face