"Except your father, hardly any one calls me Roger now! I should be glad to answer to it again." He turns and looks at me with a kind of appeal as he says this.

If he were not forty-seven and a man, I should say that he was coloring a little.

After all, blushing is confined to no age.

I have seen a veteran of sixty-five redden violently.
"Do you mean to say," cry I, looking rather aghast, and speaking, as usual, without thinking, "that you mean _me_ to call you _Roger_! indeed, I could not think of such a thing! it would sound so--so _disrespectful_! I should as soon think of calling my father _James_." "Should you ?" he answers, turning away his face toward the garden-beds, where the blue forget-me-not is unrolling her sky-colored sheet, and the double daisies are stiffly parading their tight pink buttons.

"Then call me what you like!" I am not learned in the variations of his voice, as I am in those of father and Algy, in either of which I can at once detect each fine inflection of anger, contest, or pain; but, comparatively unversed as I am in it, there sounds to me a slight, carefully smothered, yet still perceptible, intonation of disappointment--mortification.