catch glimpses of the family-room within:  he called it a pitiful tragedy going on there; yet it seemed to be a cheerful and hearty life.  This girl Grey, whom he looked on as one might on some victim from whose lungs the breath was drawn slowly, was fresh, careless, light-hearted enough.  Going to and fro in the room, now carrying one of the children, she sang it to sleep with no doleful ditty, such as young women fresh from boarding-school affect, but with a ringing, cheery song.  You might be sure that Baby would wake laughing to-morrow morning after it.  He could see her shadow pass and repass the windows; she would be out presently; she was used to come out always after the hot day’s flurry,—­to say her prayers, he believed; and he chose to see her there in the dark and coolness to bid her good-bye.  He waited, not patiently.

Grey, trotting up and down, holding by the chubby legs and wriggling arms of Master Pen, sang herself out of breath with “Roy’s Wife,” and stopped short.

“I’m sure, Pen, I don’t know what to do with you,”—­half ready to cry.

“‘Dixie,’ now, Sis.”

Pen was three years old, but he was the baby when his mother died; so Sis walked him to sleep every night:  all tender memories of her who was gone clinging about the little fat lump of mischief in his white night-gown.  A wiry voice spoke out of some corner,—­

“Yer ‘d hev a thumpin’ good warmin’, Mars’ Penrose, ef ole Oth hed his will o’ yer!  It ’ud be a special ’pensation ob de Lord fur dat chile!”

Pen prospected his sister’s face with the corner of one blue eye.  There was a line about the freckled cheeks and baby-mouth of “Sis” that sometimes agreed with Oth on the subject of dispensations, but it was not there to-night.

“No, no, uncle.  Not the last thing before he goes to bed.  I always try, myself, to see something bright and pretty for the last thing, and then shut my eyes, quick,—­just as Pen will do now:  quick! there’s my sonny boy!”

Nobody ever called Grey Gurney pretty; but Pen took an immense delight in her now; shook and kicked her for his pony, but could not make her step less firm or light; thrust his hands about her white throat; pulled the fine reddish hair down; put his dumpling face to hers.  A thin, uncertain face, but Pen knew nothing of that; he did know, though, that the skin was fresh and dewy as his own, the soft lips very ready for kisses, and the pale hazel eyes just as straightforward-looking as a baby’s.  Children and dogs believe in women like Grey Gurney.  Finally, from pure exhaustion, Pen cuddled up and went to sleep.

It was a long, narrow room where Grey and the children were, covered with rag-carpet, (she and the boys and old Oth had made the balls for it last winter):  well lighted, for Father Gurney had his desk in there to-night.  He was working at his catalogue of Sauroidichnites in Pennsylvania.  A tall, lean man, with hook-nose, and peering, protruding, blue eyes.  Captain McKinstry sat by him, turning over Brongniart; his brain, if one might judge from the frequency with which he blew his nose, evidently the worse from the wear since he came in; glancing with an irresolute awe from the book to the bony frame of the old man in his red dressing-gown, and then to the bony carcasses of the birds on the wall in their dusty plumage.