mean? It seemed to the young man that they all avoided him on this first evening of his return. His mother did not call him into her room to ask those minute and repeated questions with which mothers are so apt to tease their boys. “Oh, confound it! Now I am going to be put through my catechism!” he said usually, when he was called to one of these examinations; but its omission gave him a shock which was still more disagreeable. Could it be possible that his mother did not want to see him alone, and that the girls were afraid to be questioned by him? Fred felt very uncomfortable, without the faintest notion what could be the cause of it, when he perceived this constrained condition of the house. Then it suddenly occurred to him that old Pat Wedderburn, as he was generally and profanely called, had not come to meet him as had invariably been the case till now. “By the by,” he cried, “I felt that something was wanting, but I couldn’t make out what it was. What has become of old Pat?” “You should speak a little more respectfully, Fred, of our oldest friend,” said his mother reproachfully; but she did not look at him, and the flush grew deeper on her face, which was bent over her work. As for Susie, she pushed her chair away, and almost turned her back upon her mother. Fred immediately divined that old Pat had been objecting to some of Susie’s flirtations, which was odd, as Susie was known to be his favourite of all. “Oh, I’m respectful enough,” he said. “I don’t mean any harm. The house doesn’t seem natural without him. Why isn’t he here to-night?” “He has not been with us quite so much of late,” said Mrs. Dalyell, never lifting her eyes from her work; “but he is coming out to-morrow, and he will tell you himself, Fred.” “Has anything gone wrong?” he asked amazed; for the girls, whose voices generally ran chattering through everything, and who on an ordinary occasion would have thrown in half-a-dozen remarks, sat still as two stone images, Susie with her head averted, Alice buried in a book, which she held between her and the light. “I request,” said Mrs. Dalyell, in a voice somewhat high-pitched and imperative, as if she expected to encounter opposition, “that there be no more about it till to-morrow night.” “Oh, if it is me you mean, mamma, you may be sure there will be no more about it--till Doomsday--from me!” “Susie!” cried her brother in amazement. But Susie’s only reply was to burst from the room in a flush of rage and opposition, such as Fred had never seen in his quiet home before. Alice followed her quickly, and the young man thought that now at last there was some chance of having it out. “I suppose,” he said, “that old Pat has been at her for flirting--the little pussy that she has grown.” But before he had finished his little speech Mrs. Dalyell, too, had risen from her chair, and, standing with her back to him, was putting her work away.