Opening the door with a disdainful push, compounded partly of her contempt for the place and partly of the irritation occasioned by the events that had brought her to the degradation of calling there, Liza cried out, as well as she could in her present breathless condition,—­

“Robbie, come your ways out of this.”

The gentleman addressed was at the moment lying in a somewhat undignified position on the floor.  Half sprawling, half resting on one knee, Robbie was surprised in the midst of an amusement of which the perky little body whom he claimed as his sweetheart had previously expressed her high disdain.  This consisted of a hopeless endeavor to make a lame dog dance.  The animal in question was no other than ’Becca Rudd’s Dash, a piece of nomenclature which can only be described as the wildest and most satirical misnomer.  Liza had not been too severe on Dash’s physical infirmities when she described him as lame on one of his hind legs, for both those members were so effectually out of joint as to render locomotion of the simplest kind a difficulty attended by violent oscillation.  This was probably the circumstance that had recommended Dash as the object of Robbie’s half-drunken pastime; and after a fruitless half-hour’s exercise the tractable little creature, with a woeful expression of face, was at length poised on its hindmost parts just as Liza pushed open the door and called to its instructor.

The new arrival interrupted the course of tuition, and Dash availed himself of his opportunity to resume the normal functions of his front paws.  At this the reclining tutor looked up from his place on the floor with a countenance more of sorrow than of anger, and said, in a tone that told how deeply he was grieved, “There, lass, see how you’ve spoilt it!”

“Get up, you daft-head!  Whatever are you mufflin’ about, you silly one, lying down there with the dogs and the fleas?”

Liza still stood in the doorway with an august severity of pose that would have befitted Cassandra at the porch.  Her unsparing tirade had provoked an outburst of laughter, but not from Robbie.  There were two other occupants of the parlor—­Reuben Thwaite, who had never been numbered among the regenerate, and had always spent his Sunday mornings in this place and fashion; and little Monsey Laman, whose duty as schoolmaster usually embraced that of sexton, bell-ringer, and pew-opener combined, but who had escaped his clerical offices on this Sabbath morning by some plea of indisposition which, as was eventually perceived, would only give way before liberal doses of the medicine kept at the sign of the Red Lion.

The laughter of these worthies did not commend itself to Liza’s sympathies, for, turning hotly upon them, she said, “And you’re worse nor he is, you old sypers.”

“Liza, Liza,” cried Robbie, raising his forefinger in an attitude of remonstrance, which he had just previously been practising on the unhappy Dash,—­“Liza, think what it is to call this reverend clerk and sexton and curate a toper!”