dinner-party, the rooms were so silent, the solitude so serious. Neither the girls nor their mother made “company” of Mr. Wedderburn. He was seated in a deep chair, reading the papers while they talked, as if he were an uncle at the least, and he did not hesitate to interrupt their conversation now and then by reading out a bit of news or making a remark. He did not hesitate to correct Susie, who sometimes ventured upon a big word with which she was not familiar, and used it wrongly, or to tell Alice that she was a fidget, and could not keep still for five minutes; and as this was done from behind the newspaper, in the most accidental manner, it deepened still more the impression that nowhere could Mr. Wedderburn have been more perfectly at home. The papers, it may be added--that is to say, the London papers--arrived in Edinburgh in the evening. The conversation which was going on when Mr. Dalyell came into the drawing-room was, however, confined to the young people, and was chiefly on the subject of the Scrymgeour ball, to which Fred was going next day. “I think they might have asked me,” said Susie in an aggrieved tone. “I am just the same age as Lucy Scrymgeour. It isn’t my fault mother, that you’ve never taken me out yet. I am seventeen and _past_, as everybody knows.” “No, it’s not your fault. I am sure you have badgered me enough about it,” said Mrs. Dalyell; “but though you think you can do anything you like with me, I have my opinions about some things. And one of them is that a girl should not go out too soon. People are quite capable of saying, ten or twenty years hence, ‘Oh, Susie Dalyell, I can tell you her age to a day! She came out in such a year, and she must have been nineteen at the least.’ That is exactly how people talk.” “And if they did,” cries Susie, “what would it matter? Farmer thinks I look quite eighteen when I have my hair nicely dressed.” “That is all very well now, my dear; but wait till you are thirty or thirty-five. You would like to put on a year or two now, but you will like to take them off at the other end.” “Let’s hope,” said Mr. Wedderburn from behind his paper, “that she’ll not be Susie Dalyell then.” “What difference will that make?” said Susie scornfully. “If I were forty I should never make a mystery about it. What is the use of trying to hide it, if you do have one foot in the grave?” “Mother’s forty--or more,” said Alice, “and nobody would say she had one foot in the grave.” “Oh, what does it matter,” cried Susie again, “at that time of life, when you are medeval and antediluvious? It is now that one minds.” “Susie, don’t call mamma such dreadful names.” “Mediæval and antediluvian, Susie”--from behind the paper, in an undertone.