In such ways had the mother negotiated the needs of all her children; though the youth of the rest—­save the eldest girl, whose music lessons had meant a battle, and whose growing attractiveness for the boys of the district, and one in particular, was presently to mean another—­made as yet but small demands.  In one question, however, periodically fruitful of argument, even the youngest was becoming interested,—­the question of the visits to the household of the various friends and playmates of the children.  To these, it must be admitted, James Mesurier was apt to be hardly less of a figure of fear than to his own children; for, apart from the fact that such inroads from without were apt to disturb his few quiet evening hours with rollicking and laughter, he, being entirely unsocial in his own nature, had a curious idea that the family should be sufficient to itself, and that the desire for any form of entertainment outside it was a sign of dissatisfaction with God’s gifts of a good home, and generally a frivolity to be discouraged.

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.