come and spend a few weeks at the house.

Cousin Bessie has most seriously maintained to this day that we
treated her very shabbily on this occasion; she declares she shall
never forgive Arthur, but she says it so good-humouredly that I am
tempted to suspect her sincerity.

That she should have brought us together in the fulness and generosity
of her heart, and that we should have taken advantage of the
opportunity she afforded us of enjoying one another's company from
morning until night, to plot and plan a speedy escape from her
immediate guardianship, seemed to her a selfish and ungrateful return
for so great a favour.

But she was too kind-hearted to wear her pleasant scowl very long. Mr.
Nyle would talk of a time when "somebody" that he "had since had
reason to know very well had committed just such an appalling offence,
herself and," he argued, very suggestively, "unless that 'somebody'
has had reason to regret and repent of her own rash ingratitude," he
"could not see why she should interfere with other people, who were
tempted to follow in her footsteps."

Zita and Louis laughed merrily at such allusions from their father,
whose own eyes sparkled with the "light of other days," as he spoke
them, and Cousin Bessie either bowed her head much lower than usual
over her knitting as she heard them, or looked playfully up at her
husband with a quick revival of the old time love in her pleasant,
earnest features, and entreated him to "have sense, for mercy's sake
and not have the children laughing at him."