Harold with elaborate unconcern adjusts his trouser clips. “I should have thought that was more a matter for the Bank to complain of, if necessary. I may be wrong, of course----” “You may be wrong, sir, because in my experience you almost invariably are wrong and never more so than when you lad-di-dah that you are right. You may be wrong, but let me tell you what you may not be. You may not be impertinent to me, sir. You may not lad-di-dah me, sir.” “Father, I really do not see why at my age I should be hounded out of the house like this every morning.” “You are hounded out, as you elegantly express it, because morning after morning, owing to your disgustingly slothful habits, you clash with me, sir. My breakfast is delayed because you clash with me, and the house is delayed because you clash with me, and the whole parish is delayed because you clash with me.” “Perhaps you’re not aware that Robert clashes with me.” “Dash Robert! Are you going or are you not going?” He goes. “Bring back the paper.” He brings it back. Wonderful father! Rosalie’s father gives a tug at the bell cord that would have dislocated the neck of a horse. The cord comes away in his hand. He hurls it across the room. Glorious father! There was a most frightful storm one night and Rosalie, in Anna’s bed with Flora crowded in also and Hilda shivering in her nightgown beside them, too young to be frightened but with her sister’s fright beginning to communicate itself to her, said, “Ask father to go and stop it.” “Fool!” cried Flora. “How could father stop the storm?” Why not? CHAPTER II Flora’s sharp and astounding reply to that question of Rosalie’s was recalled by Rosalie, with hurt surprise at Flora’s sharpness and ignorance, when, shortly afterwards, she found in a book a man who could, and actually did, stop a storm. This was a man called Prospero in a book called “The Tempest.” She was never--that Rosalie--the conventional wonder-child of fiction who reads before ten all that its author probably never read before thirty; but she could read when she was six and she read widely and curiously, choosing her entertainment, from her father’s bookshelves, solely by the method of reading every book that had pictures.