The sermon over, they walked home in proximity. The husband looked
gloomy, and his eyes sought the ground. The wife looked more smiling
than cheerful, and her pretty eyes went hither and thither. Behind
them walked the child--steadily, "with level-fronting eyelids."

It was a late-built region of large, common-place houses, and at one
of them they stopped and entered. The door of the dining-room was
open, showing the table laid for their Sunday dinner. The gentleman
passed on to the library behind it, the lady went up to her bedroom,
and the child a stage higher to the nursery.

It wanted half an hour to dinner. Mr. Greatorex sat down, drummed with
his fingers on the arm of his easy-chair, took up a book of arctic
exploration, threw it again on the table, got up, and went to the
smoking-room. He had built it for his wife's sake, but was often glad
of it for his own. Again he seated himself, took a cigar, and smoked
gloomily.

Having reached her bedroom, Mrs. Greatorex took off her bonnet, and
stood for ten minutes turning it round and round. Earnestly she
regarded it--now gave a twist to the wire-stem of a flower, then
spread wider the loop of a bow. She was meditating what it lacked of
perfection rather than brooding over its merits: she was keen in
bonnets.

Little Sophy--or, as she called herself by a transposition of
consonant sounds common with children, Phosy--found her nurse Alice in
the nursery. But she was lost in the pages of a certain London weekly,
which had found her in a mood open to its influences, and did not even
look up when the child entered. With some effort Phosy drew off her