"No, Peter is _not_ ready;" and the tone of her voice sent a heavier weight down into his heart, and a bigger lump into his throat. "Your card has only just reached me, Katherine." "Oh dear! dear!" His aunt shook her head in distress, and five boy faces settled into blank dismay. "Why, why, surely you don't mean, Ruth--eh? Can't you hurry things up a little? Boys don't need much, you know! Or--can't he be sent after us?" Peter followed his mother to the dining-room as she went to order a hasty lunch for the travellers. "Mother, can't I?--_can't_ I?" he sobbed. She put her arms around him, with streaming eyes, feeling the keenness of the disappointment for him as deeply as he ever could feel it for himself. "Oh, my boy! my boy! my heart is sad and sore that you should be mean and sly and deceitful, and not for once only, but as a habit. No, it is your own doing, and you must abide by the consequences. I never could have brought myself to punish you so, but you have punished yourself, and I trust it may be the best thing which could have happened to you." [Illustration: "WHAT ARE THE WILD WAVES SAYING?"--FROM A PAINTING BY C. W. NICHOLLS.] WHAT ARE THE WILD WAVES SAYING? The story of Paul Dombey and his sister Florence is one of the sweetest and most pathetic stories Charles Dickens ever told. One can scarcely think of these children--motherless (the mother died when Paul was born), and Florence worse than fatherless, for her father had never forgiven her birth six years before that of the wished-for son, and had never given her a kind word or look, living in the great, comfortless, lonely Dombey house, and finding all their happiness in each other--without tears. For it was to the sister so cruelly neglected and despised that Paul turned from the very first. It was she who on the day of his christening won from him his first laugh. "As she hid behind her nurse, he followed her with his eyes, and when she peeped out with a merry cry to him, he sprang up and crowed lustily, laughing outright when she ran in upon him, and seeming to fondle her curls with his tiny hands while she smothered him with kisses." And as he grew out of babyhood, much as it displeased the father (who would have had his idol care for no one but himself), little Paul was never content save when his sister was by his side.