"Your father has gone to the club, after all," she said, and gave a sigh of relief as she worked away at her embroidery, making holes in a strip of muslin and stitching round them, for the adornment of the elder daughter's petticoat. She was a timid woman, in spite of her fine and handsome appearance, with a great fear of the unusual. It was her husband's habit to go out. The thought of him sitting alone and idle in the other room had been weighing on her mind. The children paid no attention; they were all a little tired and languid and disinclined for their usual amusements after the excitement of last night's dance and the exertion of their morning on the ice. Even Deleah, the reader of the family, neglected her book to lie back in her chair and gaze into the fire, the music of galop, and rattle of her father's tambourine humming in her ears; before her eyes figures chasing each other over the blue sheet of ice or flying rhythmically over polished boards. Franky having temporarily deserted his paint-box and the _Illustrated News_ he had designed to colour for many tinted sheets of gelatine, saved from the crackers on last night's supper table, now held them in turn before his eyes. "Mama, you're all red--all lovely red, like roses," or "Bessie, you're frightful--you're white as if you felt sick," he cried, accordingly as a red or a green transparency was before his eyes. The game called "Tactics," over which Bessie and Bernard nightly quarrelled, had been so far neglected; a circumstance not to be regretted, since Bessie generally played a losing game in tears, and signalised Bernard's victory by upsetting the board and flinging the red and white ivory pegs in his face. For, the last night's dance, which had been an engrossing topic for several weeks before it had come off, now that it was over must still be talked about. How silly Deleah had looked when her white satin shoe had come off and shot across the slippery floor in the last waltz; and she would not stop, for all that, but finished the dance without it. "Were your shoes too big, Deleah?" "A little, mama. They were a pair of Bessie's last year's ones, that were too small for her." "There you go! At me again!" Bessie cried. "Deda is proud because her foot is smaller than mine, mama. If you're a little weed of a thing like Deda, of course your feet are narrow and small. They have to be. There's no merit in it." "And I suppose Deleah danced her silk stockings into holes?" "No, mama! Mr. Frost, I was waltzing with, held me up most beautifully; so that after the shoe came off my feet never once touched the floor." "Lucky it wasn't you, Bessie! It would have been the finish of poor Frost to have tried to carry such a lump as you." "Mama, will you speak to Bernard, and ask him not to be always saying rude things about me." "Hush, Bessie! Nonsense! Bernard, my dear, do try to be more polite to your sister." "Mama, here's a motter I rather like in this green cracker.