We shall take her, of course--" "Have you asked her ?" "I told her we were all going--and to meet Lord Glaramara.

She didn't say anything." Dr.Hooper laughed.
"You'll find her, I expect, a very independent young woman--" But at that moment his daughter Nora, after a hurried and perfunctory knock, opened the study door vehemently, and put in a flushed face.
"Father, I want to speak to you!" "Come in, my dear child.

But I can't spare more than five minutes." And the Reader glanced despairingly at a clock, the hands of which were pointing to half past ten a.m.How it was that, after an eight o'clock breakfast, it always took so long for a man to settle himself to his work he really could not explain.

Not that his conscience did not sometimes suggest the answer, pointing to a certain slackness and softness in himself--the primal shrinking from work, the primal instinct to sit and dream--that had every day to be met and conquered afresh, before the student actually found himself in his chair, or lecturing from his desk with all his brains alert.

Anyway, the Reader, when there was no college or university engagement to pin him down, would stand often--"spilling the morning in recreation"; in other words, gossiping with his wife and children, or loitering over the newspapers, till the inner monitor turned upon him.