restless under her arm.
“A nail is coming out,” he answered.
It was so; whilst she had been speaking to him he was working at one of the brass studs, and had loosened its bite in the chair.
“Oh, Jamie! you are making work by thus drawing out a nail. Can you not help me a little, and reduce the amount one has to think of and do? You have not been attending to what I said, and I was so much in earnest.” She spoke in a tone of discouragement, and the tone, more than the words, impressed the susceptible heart of the boy. He began to cry.
“You are cross.”
“I am not cross, my pet; I am never cross with you, I love you too dearly; but you try my patience sometimes, and just now I am overstrained—and then I did want to make you understand.”
“Now papa’s dead I’ll do no more lessons, shall I?” asked Jamie, coaxingly.
“You must, indeed, and with me instead of papa.”
“Not rosa, rosæ?”
“Yes, rosa, rosæ.”
Then he sulked.
“I don’t love you a bit. It is not fair. Papa is dead, so I ought not to have any more lessons. I hate rosa, rosæ!” He kicked the legs of the chair peevishly with his heels. As his sister said nothing, seemed to be inattentive—for she was weary and dispirited—he slapped her cheek by raising his hand over his head.
“What, Jamie, strike me, your only friend?”
Then he threw his arms round her again, and kissed her. “I’ll love you; only, Ju, say I am not to do rosa, rosæ!”
“How long have you been working at the first declension in the Latin grammar, Jamie?”
He tried for an instant to think, gave up the effort, laid his head on her shoulder, and said:
“I don’t know and don’t care. Say I am not to do rosa, rosæ!”
“What! not if papa wished it?”
“I hate the Latin grammar!”
For a while both remained silent. Judith felt the tension to which her mind and nerves had been subjected, and lapsed momentarily into a condition of something like unconsciousness, in which she was dimly sensible of a certain satisfaction rising out of the pause in thought and effort. The boy lay quiet, with his head on her shoulder, for a while, then withdrew his arms, folded his hands on his lap, and began to make a noise by compressing the air between the palms.
“There’s a finch out there going ‘chink! chink!’ and listen, Ju, I can make ‘chink! chink!’ too.”
Judith recovered herself from her distraction, and said:
“Never mind the finch now. Think of what I say. We shall have to leave this house.”
“Why?”
“Of course we must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better. It is no more ours.”
“Yes, it is ours. I have my rabbits here.”
“Now that papa is dead it is no longer ours.”
“It’s a wicked shame.”
“Not at all, Jamie. This house was given to papa for his life only; now it will go to a new rector, and Aunt Dunes[B] is going to fetch us away to another house.”
[B] Dunes is the short for Dionysia.
“When?”
“To-day.”
“I won’t go,” said the boy. “I swear I won’t.”
“Hush, hush, Jamie! Don’t use such expressions. I do not know where you have picked them up. We must go.”
“And my rabbits, are they to go too?”
“The rabbits? We’ll see about them. Aunt——”
“I hate Aunt Dunes!”
“You really must not call her that; if she hears you she will be very angry. And consider, she has been taking a great deal of trouble about us.”
“I don’t care.”
“My dear, she is dear papa’s sister.”
“Why didn’t papa get a nicer sister—like you?”
“Because he had to take what God gave him.”
The boy pouted, and began to kick his heels against the chair-legs once more.
“Jamie, we must leave this house to-day. Aunt is coming to take us both away.”
“I won’t go.”
“But, Jamie, I am going, and the cook is going, and so is Jane.”
“Are cook and Jane coming with us?”
“No, dear.”
“Why not?”
“We shall not want them. We cannot afford to keep them any more, to pay their wages; and then we shall not go into a house of our own. You must come with me, and be a joy and rest to me, dear Jamie.”
She turned her head over, and leaned it on his head. The sun glowed in their mingled hair—all of one tinge and lustre. It sparkled in the tears on her cheek.
“Ju, may I have these buttons?”
“What buttons?”
“Look!”
He shook himself free from his sister, slid his feet to the ground, went to a bureau, and brought to his sister a large open basket that had been standing on the top of the bureau. It had been turned out of a closet by Aunt Dionysia, and contained an accumulation of those most profitless of collected remnants—odd buttons, coat buttons, brass, smoked mother-of-pearl, shirt buttons, steel clasps—buttons of all kinds, the gathering together made during twenty-five years. Why the basket, after having been turned out of a lumber closet, had been left in the room of death, or why, if turned out elsewhere, it had been brought there, is more than even the novelist can tell. Suffice it that there it was, and by whom put there could not be said.
“Oh! what a store of pretty buttons!” exclaimed the boy. “Do look, Ju, these great big ones are just like those on Cheap Jack’s red waistcoat. Here is a brass one with a horse on it. Do see! Oh, Ju, please get your needle and thread and sew this one on to my black dress.”
Judith sighed. It was in vain for her to impress the realities
