"I cannot explain. I do not understand anything more than that he, my brother,--mine!--has involved Austin in--in--" (a fresh burst of tears.) I comforted, scolded, laughed, preached, and adjured in a breath; and then, drawing my mother gently on, entered my father's study. At the table was seated Mr Squills, pen in hand, and a glass of his favourite punch by his side. My father was standing on the hearth, a shade more pale; but with a resolute expression on his countenance, which was new to its indolent thoughtful mildness! He lifted his eyes as the door opened, and then, putting his finger to his lips, as he glanced towards my mother, he said gaily, "No great harm done. Don't believe her! Women always exaggerate, and make realities of their own bugbears: it is the vice of their lively imaginations, as Wierus has clearly shown in accounting for the marks, moles, and hare-lips which they inflict upon their innocent infants before they are even born. My dear boy," added my father, as I here kissed him and smiled in his face, "I thank you for that smile! God bless you!" He wrung my hand, and turned a little aside. "It is a great comfort," renewed my father, after a short pause, "to know, when a misfortune happens, that it could not be helped. Squills has just discovered that I have no bump of cautiveness; so that, craniologically speaking, if I had escaped one imprudence, I should certainly have run my head against another." "A man with your development is made to be taken in," said Mr Squills, consolingly. "Do you hear that, my own Kitty! and have you the heart to blame Jack any longer--a poor creature cursed with a bump that would take in the Stock Exchange? And can any one resist his bump, Squills?" "Impossible!" said the surgeon authoritatively. "Sooner or later it must involve him in its airy meshes--eh, Squills? entrap him into its fatal cerebral cell. There his fate waits him, like the ant-lion in its pit." "Too true," quoth Squills. "What a phrenological lecturer you would have made!" "Go, then, my love," said my father, "and lay no blame but on this melancholy cavity of mine, where cautiveness--is not! Go, and let Sisty have some supper; for Squills says that he has a fine development of the mathematical organs, and we want his help. We are hard at work on figures, Pisistratus." My mother looked broken-hearted, and, obeying submissively, stole to the door without a word. But as she reached the threshold she turned round, and beckoned to me to follow her. I whispered to my father, and went out. My mother was standing in the hall, and I saw by the lamp that she had dried her tears; and that her face, though very sad, was more composed.