Aunt Christie gone, Miss Crampton gone also!  What a happy state of things for the young Mortimers!  If Crayshaw had been with them, there is no saying what they might have done; but Johnnie, by his father’s orders, had brought a youth of seventeen to spend three weeks with him, and the young fellow turned out to be such a dandy, and so much better pleased to be with the girls than with Johnnie scouring the country and skating, that John for the first time began to perceive the coming on of a fresh source of trouble in his house.  Gladys and Barbara were nearly fourteen years old, but looked older; they were tall, slender girls, black-haired and grey-eyed, as their mother had been, very simple, full of energy, and in mind and disposition their father’s own daughters.  Johnnie groaned over his unpromising companion, Edward Conyngham by name; but he was the son of an old friend, and John did what he could to make the boys companionable, while the girls, though they laughed at young Conyngham, were on the whole more amused with his compliments than their father liked.  But it was not till one day, going up into Parliament, and finding some verses pinned on a curtain, that he began to feel what it was to have no lady to superintend his daughters.

“What are they?” Gladys said.  “Why, papa, Cray sent them; they are supposed to have been written by Conyngham.”

“What does he know about Conyngham?”

“Oh, I told him when I last wrote.”

“When you last wrote,” repeated John, in a cogitative tone.

“Yes; I write about once a fortnight, of course, when Barbara writes to Johnnie.”

“Did Miss Crampton superintend the letters?” was John’s next inquiry.

“Oh no, father, we always wrote them up here.”

“I wonder whether Janie would have allowed this,” thought John.  “I suppose as they are so young it cannot signify.”

“Cray sent them because we told him how Conyngham walked after Gladys wherever she went.  That boy is such a goose, father; you never heard such stuff as he talks when you are away.”

John was silent.

“Johnnie and Cray are disgusted with his rubbish,” continued Barbara, “pretending to make love and all that.”

“Yes,” said John; “it is very ridiculous.  Boys like Conyngham and Crayshaw ought to know better.”  Nothing, he felt, could be so likely to make the schoolroom distasteful to his daughters as this early admiration.  Still he was consoled by the view they took of it.

“Cray does know better, of course,” said Gladys carelessly.

“Still, he was extremely angry with Conyngham, for being so fond of Gladys,” remarked Barbara; “because you know she is his friend.  He would never hear about his puppy, that old Patience Smith takes care of for sixpence a week, or his rabbits that we have here, or his hawk that lives at Wigfield, unless Gladys wrote; Mr. Brandon never writes to him.”