gesture, “No noise, no noise!” That was what everybody said. Mary would smile at them when she met them, or wave her hand from the end of the corridor, or over the stairs. Sometimes she would pause and stoop down and kiss them, looking very pale and worn out. “No, dear, he is no better,” she would say. Except for these encounters, and the accounts which the servants gave them of their grandfather’s state,--how he was lying, just breathing, knowing nobody, not able to speak,--accounts which froze the children’s blood in their veins--they had no life at all; only dull meals which they ate under this shadow, and dull hours in which, having nothing to do, they huddled together, weary and lonely, and with nothing before them but to go to bed. Out of doors it was not much better. Mr. Pen had fallen into all the old disorder of his ways, out of which he had made a strenuous effort to wake for their benefit. He never was ready for them when they went with their lessons. “I will hear you to-morrow,” he would say, looking at them with painful humility, feeling the grave countenance of Lilias more terrible than that of any judge; and when to-morrow came, there were always a hundred excuses. “Go on to the next page and learn the next lesson. I have had such a press of work--and Mrs. Pennithorne is so poorly,” the poor man would say. All this shook the pillars of the earth to Lilias and Nello. They were shaken out of everything they knew, and left to blunder out their life as best they could, without any guide.