A shrill whistle from the gate sounded as the boy spoke. "That's him again!" he exclaimed, running to the door of the room. "He's been at it ever so long, perhaps; and won't he just give it me if he has!" Everybody was silent; and George heard the boy opening the hall-door and going out to the gate. He heard a brief colloquy, and a deep voice with rather a sulky tone in it, and then heavy footsteps coming along the paved garden-walk and counting the steps before the door. "It's your pa, Izzie," Mrs. Sleaford said. "He'll want a candle: you'd better take it out to him; I don't suppose he'll care about coming in here." George Gilbert felt a kind of curiosity about Isabel's father, and was rather disappointed when he learnt that Mr. Sleaford was not coming into the parlour. But Sigismund Smith went on eating bread and cheese, and fishing pickled onions out of a deep stone jar, without any reference to the movements of the barrister. Isabel took a candle, and went out into the hall to greet her father. She left the door ajar, and George could hear her talking to Mr. Sleaford; but the barrister answered his daughter with a very ill grace, and the speech which George heard plainest gave him no very favourable impression of his host. "Give me the light, girl, and don't bother!" Mr. Sleaford said. "I've been worried this day until my head's all of a muddle. Don't stand staring at me, child! Tell your mother I've got some work to do, and mayn't go to bed all night." "You've been worried, papa?" "Yes; infernally. And I don't want to be bothered by stupid questions now I've got home. Give me the light, can't you?" The heavy footsteps went slowly up the uncarpeted staircase, a door opened on the floor above, and the footsteps were heard in the room over the parlour. Isabel came in, looking very grave, and sat down, away from the table. George saw that all pleasure was over for that night; and even Sigismund came to a pause in his depredations on the cheese, and meditated, with a pickled onion on the end of his fork. He was thinking that a father who ill-used his daughter would not be a bad subject for penny numbers; and he made a mental plan of the plot for a new romance.