The room was so small that Emily had a difficulty in reaching Mrs. Cartwright to shake hands with her, owing to Dagworthy’s almost blocking the only available way round the table.  He stood up and drew back, waiting his turn for greeting; when it came, he assumed the manner of an old friend.  A chair was found for Emily, and conversation, or what passed for such, speedily regathered volume.  The breakfast things were still on the table, and Miss Geraldine, who was always reluctant to rise of a, morning, was engaged upon her meal.

‘You see what it’s come to, Mr. Dagworthy,’ exclaimed the mother of the family, with her usual lack of reticence.  ’Jessie can’t or won’t learn by herself, so she has to bother Emily to come and teach her.  It’s too bad, I call it, just in her holiday time.  She looks as if she wanted to run about and get colour in her cheeks, don’t you think so?’

‘Well, mother,’ cried Jessie, ’you needn’t speak as if Emily was a child in short clothes.’

The other girls laughed.

‘I dare say Emily wishes she was,’ pursued Mrs. Cartwright.  ’When you’re little ones, you’re all for being grown up, and when you are grown up, then you see how much better off you were before,—­that is, if you’ve got common sense.  I wish my girls had half as much all put together as Emily has.’

‘I’m sure I don’t wish I was a child,’ remarked Geraldine, as she bit her bread-and-butter.

‘Of course you don’t, Geraldine,’ replied Dagworthy, who was on terms of much familiarity with all the girls.  ’If you were, your mother wouldn’t let you come down late to breakfast, would she?’

‘I never remember being in time for breakfast since I was born,’ cried the girl.

‘I dare say your memory doesn’t go far enough back,’ rejoined Dagworthy, with the smile of one who trifled from a position of superior age and experience.

Mrs. Cartwright laughed with a little embarrassment.  Amy, the eldest girl, was quick with an inquiry whether Emily had been as yet to the Agricultural Show, the resort at present of all pleasure-seeking Dunfieldians.  Emily replied that she had not, and to this subject the talk strayed.  Mr. Dagworthy had dogs on exhibition at the show.  Barbara wanted to know how much he would take for a certain animal which had captivated her; if she had some idea that this might lead to an offer of the dog as a present, she was doomed to disappointment, for Dagworthy named his price in the most matter-of-fact way.  But nothing had excited so much interest in these young ladies as the prize pigs; they were in raptures at the incredible degree of fatness attained; they delighted to recall that some of the pigs were fattened to such a point that rollers had to be placed under their throats to keep their heads up and prevent them from being choked by the pressure of their own superabundant flesh.  In all this conversation Dagworthy took his part, but not quite with the same freedom as before Emily’s arrival.  His eyes turned incessantly in her direction, and once or twice he only just saved himself from absent-mindedness when a remark was addressed to him.  It was with obvious reluctance that he at length rose to leave.