“Oh, John, what an old bear you are!” said Margaret. He made her uneasy. It seemed as if something must have happened during the night. Was her father, perhaps, going to have a leg off, or an arm? She knew this was nonsense; but John’s paraphernalia and his face both looked so. She went to the West Chamber, where all her special possessions were, and got her little writing-case, which one of her sisters had given her. Last night before she went to bed she had set up a little drawing she had done, and which she thought was more successful than any hitherto attempted. She had set it up so that she might see it the first thing in the morning, to judge how it bore the light of day. And on the table was Rob’s block with the sketch he had made of Sir Ludovic in his chair. He was to come again that very day, with her father’s consent, to go on with it. All this looked somehow, she could not tell how, a long way off to Margaret, as if something had happened to set these simple plans aside. She felt, in the jargon of her new art, as if the foreground had suddenly grown into such importance that all that was behind it was thrown miles back. It was very strange; and yet nothing had happened, only her father was lazy, and had not got out of bed. “Who is it for? And am I to write from myself, papa, or am I to write for you?” she said, sitting down at the bedside and opening her writing-case. He paused, and looked at her for a moment before he spoke. “It is to your sisters, to Jean and Grace, my little Peggy.” “To Jean and Grace!” “To ask them, if it is quite convenient, to come here now, instead of waiting till September, according to their general custom--” “Oh, papa!” cried Margaret, suddenly realizing the change that was coming in her life; the sketches and the drawing-lessons, and the talks, and the confidences, and Rob Glen himself-- What would Jean and Grace say to Rob? She felt as if in a moment all her little structure of amusement and pleasure was falling to pieces. She closed her writing-case again with a gesture of despair. “Oh, papa, is not September soon enough? I don’t want them here now. In--the summer,” said Margaret, hastily, blushing for herself at the little subtle subterfuge to which she was resorting to conceal her real terror--“in the summer there is always something-- I mean so many things to do.” “Yes,” her father said, with a smile; “and for some of us, my little girl, things we shall never do again.” She did not realize the meaning of this, and perhaps Margaret may be pardoned if, not knowing the sadder circumstances involved, her mind was for the moment absorbed in her own disappointment and confusion; the sudden sense of arrest and stoppage in all her pleasant ways which overwhelmed her. “Why do you want them, papa?” she went on; “am I not enough? You used to say you liked me best. You used to say, just you and me, you and me, got on best in the old house.”