“And, tell me honestly, are you not, as I strongly suspect, less careful to obey your father’s orders when he is away, so that you feel yourself in a measure out of his reach, than when he is close at hand?”

“Papa, you ask such hard questions,” she said.

“Hard to my little daughter only because of her own wrong-doing.  But hard or easy, they must be answered.  Tell me the truth, would you not have been more careful to keep within prescribed bounds last night if I had been at home, or you had known that you would see me here to-day?”

“Yes, papa,” she answered, in a low, unwilling tone.  “I don’t think anybody else can have quite so much authority over me as you, and—­and so I do, I suppose, act a little more as if I could do as I please when you are away.”

“And that after I have explained to you again and again that in my absence you are quite as much under the authority of the kind friends with whom I have placed you as under mine when I am with you.  I see there is no effectual way to teach you the lesson but by punishing you for disregarding it.”

Then he made her give him a detailed account of her ramble of the night before and its consequences.

When she had gone as far in the narrative as her safe arrival among the alarmed household, he asked whether her Grandma Elsie inflicted any punishment upon her.

“No, sir,” answered Lulu, hanging her head and speaking in a sullen tone.  “I told her I didn’t feel as if anybody had any right to punish me but you.”

“Lulu I did you dare to talk in that way to her?” exclaimed the captain.  “I hope she punished you for your impertinence; for if she did not I certainly must.”

“She lectured me then, and this morning told me my punishment was a prohibition against wandering away from the rest more than just a few yards.

“But, papa, they were all so unkind to me at breakfast—­I mean all but Grandma Elsie and Mamma Vi and Gracie.  Betty looked sneering, and the others so cold and distant, and Rosie said something very insulting about my being a bad, troublesome child and frightening Mamma Vi into a headache.”

“Certainly no more than you deserved,” her father said.  “Did you bear it with patience and humility, as you ought?”

“Do you mean that I must answer you, papa?”

“Most assuredly I do; tell me at once exactly what you did and said.”

“I don’t want to, papa,” she said, half angrily.

“You are never to say that when I give you an order,” he returned, in a tone of severity; “never venture to do it again.  Tell me, word for word, as nearly as you can remember it, what reply you made to Rosie’s taunt.”

“Papa, I didn’t say anything to her; I just got up and pushed back my chair, and turned to leave the table.  Then Grandma Elsie asked me what I wanted, and I said I didn’t want anything, but would rather go without my breakfast than stay there to be insulted.  Then she told me to sit down and eat, and Rosie wouldn’t make any more unkind speeches.”