slight sound at her back, and, wheeling, saw her grandfather looking out
from the library door. A swift premonition of possible additional
misfortune seized her. Moving toward the side entrance she said to Janet,
"We'd better be going right away."

It was, however, too late. "Well, little girls," he remarked
benevolently, "since Miss Gomes has left for the day it would be as well
if I heard your geography lesson."

"I don't think mother intended for us to study today," Laurel replied,
making a face of appeal for Janet's support. But the latter remained
solidly and silently neutral.

"What, what," the elder mildly exploded; "mutiny in the forecastle! Get
right up here in the break of the quarter-deck or I'll harry you." He
stood aside while Laurel and Janet filed into the library. Geography was
the only subject their grandfather proposed for his instruction, and the
lesson, she knew, might take any one of several directions. He sometimes
heard it with the precision of Miss Gomes herself; he might substitute
for the regular questions such queries, drawn from his wide voyages, as
he thought to be of infinitely greater use and interest; or, better
still, he frequently gave them the benefit of long reminiscences,
through which they sat blinking in a mechanical attention or slightly
wriggling with minds far away from the old man's periods, full of
outlandish names and places, and, when he got excited, shocking swears.

He turned the easy-chair--the one which Laurel had thought of as a
ship--away from the fireplace, now covered with a green slatted blind for
the summer; and they drew forward two of the heavy chairs with shining
claw feet that stood against the wall. Smiley's Geography, a book no