imperfections. But he read them to her in his mellow voice, with little explanations, reminiscences not disagreeable to himself, and which suggested other and more lengthened recollections, all of which were delightful to his admiring wife. It was not till Christmas, when she suddenly woke up to the passage of time by the startling reminder of little Tom’s return from school for the holidays, that she remembered how much time had passed. To be brought suddenly to a pause in the midst of one’s enthusiasm is always disagreeable, and the thought had been uneasy in Carry’s mind for several days before she put it timidly into words. ‘It has all been delightful,’ she said. ‘To trace you back through all your school-boy time and at college is so nice that I know I have been persuading you to make the most of it for my sake. But, Edward, you must not humour me any more. I feel that it is wasting your time.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘when one has to pick up one’s thread it is best to do it thoroughly. This will all be of service, every word of it.’ ‘I see, you mean to begin with a retrospect,’ she cried, brightening again. ‘Not so much as a retrospect,’ he said, with a twinge of conscience, ‘but one’s early ideas, though they are often absurd, are very suggestive.’ ‘Oh, not absurd,’ she cried. It wounded her to hear such a word applied to anything of his. But little Tom had come home for his holidays, which showed that it was four or five months since the settling down. They had taken possession of Easton in the end of August. Tom came home very manly and grown up after his first ‘half’ at school. He was close upon eleven, and he had a very high opinion of his own position and prospects. His school was a large preparatory one, where things were done as much as possible on the model of Eton, which was the goal of all the little boy’s ambitions. It was a little disappointing after the first genuine moment of pleasure in coming home, and the ecstatic sense of being a very great man to Janet, to find that after all Janet was only a little girl and did not understand the half of what he told her. He felt the want of male society very much upon the second day, and to think that there would not be a fellow to speak to for a whole month damped the delightful prospect of being his own master for that time, which had smiled so much upon him. Janet, it is scarcely necessary to say, gave a boundless faith to her brother, and listened to the tale of his achievements, and of what the fellows did, with an interest unalloyed by criticism. Her mouth and her eyes were full of a round O! of wonder and admiration. She never tired of hearing of the feats and the scrapes and the heroic incidents of school. To dazzle her so completely was something; but a mind accustomed to the company of the nobler sex soon tired of the tameness of feminine society, and with the candour of his age Tom very soon made it apparent that he was bored.