vivant! One can scarcely look on such sacrilege and live, so I retire upstairs precipitately in search of Larry, who, evidently not valuing his life at a brass farthing, if he remain under the roof that shelters his parent, has escaped by some upper window and got away. In the midst of the wrathful clamour below, comes a shrill tinkle from our rusty front door bell, and straightway papa retires to the library, and is plainly audible to something more than the ear of faith, taking it out of the furniture.
"It is only Tempest," says Basan, who has followed me, peeping round the big leaves of the magnolia tree that clothes the outside of our house with glossy green in winter, and creamy, fainting flower-cups in summer.
"Only George! It could not well be much more!" I say.
"He looks so queer," says Basan, stretching his neck again. "He has on a long grey overcoat and a boxer; and his face is as long as my arm."
"Does he look as though he were going away?" I ask anxiously. "Does he look as though he had come to say good-bye?" then, recollecting myself, "Go downstairs, there's a good Basan, and make as much noise as you can, so as to drown the row the governor is making!"
I have been "fetched" twice, and now I am standing outside the drawing-room with my hand on the knob of the door, fearing to turn it. A crash of amazing magnitude from the library hardby suggests the desirability of my immediately hiding somewhere, so I enter the room with some haste to find George standing with his back to me, stooping over something that instinct tells me is a little ugly, disreputable photograph that the sun and a Silverbridge photographer worked between them to my eternal discredit. He has on a travelling coat, just as Basan said; and there is about him that brushed up, stiff, touch-me-not air that Englishmen mostly put on when they go abroad, and take off when they stay
