They're nasty little pears,"-- with a touch of personal resentment.
Uncle Charles smiled at last, but it was not quite his usual smile.
"Miss Molly," said a voice from the door, "your mamma has sent for you." "It's not bedtime yet." "Your mamma says you are to come at once," was the reply.
Molly, knowing from experience that an appeal to Charles was useless on these occasions, wriggled down from her perch rather reluctantly, and bade her uncle "Good-night." "Perhaps it will be better to-morrow," she said, consolingly.
"Perhaps," he said, nodding at her; and he took her little head between his hands, and kissed her.

She rubbed his kiss off again, and walked gravely away.

She could not be merry and ride in triumph up-stairs on kind curvetting Sarah's willing back, while her friend was "uncomferable inside." There was no galloping down the passage that night, no pleasantries with the sponge in Molly's tub, no last caperings in light attire.

Molly went silently to bed, and as on a previous occasion when in great anxiety about Vic, who had thoughtlessly gone out in the twilight for a stroll, and had forgotten the lapse of time, she added a whispered clause to her little petitions which the ear of "Ninny" failed to catch.
Charles recognized, in the way Evelyn had taken Molly from him, that she was not yet appeased.

It should be remembered, in order to do her justice, that a good woman's means of showing a proper resentment are so straitened and circumscribed by her conscience that she is obliged, from actual want of material, to resort occasionally to little acts of domestic tyranny, small in themselves as midge bites, but, fortunately for the cause of virtue, equally exasperating.