As a boy he had grown up without companions, and as a man had remained lonely, till he had met in his wife the one comrade of his days. What had been good enough for their father should be good enough for his children, was a formula which he applied all round to their bringing up, curiously forgetful, for a man at heart so just, of the pleasure one would have expected it to be to make sure that the errors of his own training were not repeated in that of his offspring. But, indeed, there was in him constitutionally something of the Puritan suspicion of, and aversion from, pleasure, which it had never occurred to him to consider as the end of, or, indeed, as a considerable element of existence. Life was somehow too serious for play, spiritually as well as materially; and much work and a little rest was the eternal and, on the whole, salutary lot of man. Such were some of the conditions among which the young Mesuriers found themselves, and of which their impatience had become momentously explosive this February evening. For some days there had been an energetic simmer of rebellion among the four elder children against a new edict of early rising which was surely somewhat arbitrary. Early rising was one of James Mesurier's articles of faith; and he was always up and dressed by half-past six, though there was no breakfast till eight, and absolutely no necessity for his rising at that hour beyond his own desire. There was still less, indeed none at all, for his children to rise thus early; but nevertheless he had recently decreed that such, for the future, must be the rule. The rule fell heaviest upon the sisters, for the elder brother had always enjoyed a certain immunity from such edicts. His sense of justice, however, kindled none the less at this final piece of tyranny. He blazed and fumed indignantly on behalf of his sisters, in the sanctuary of that little study,--a spot where the despot seldom set foot; and out of this comparatively trivial cause had sprung a mighty resolution, which he and she whom he proudly honoured as "sister and friend" had, after some girding of the loins, repaired to the front parlour this evening to communicate. They had entered somewhat abruptly, and stood rather dramatically by the table on which the father was writing,--the son with dark set face, in which could be seen both the father and mother, and the daughter, timid and close to him, resolutely keeping back her tears, a slim young copy of the mother. "Well, my dears?" said the father, looking up with a keen, rather surprised glance, and in a tone which qualified with some severity the "my dears." The son had had some exceedingly fine beginnings in his head, but they fled ignominiously with the calm that was necessary for their successful delivery, and he blurted at once to the point. "We have come to say that we are no longer comfortable at home, and have decided to leave it."