'Never,' said Ethel, so emphatically that she nettled him into adding,
'He is a standing warning against spoiling one's patients. I wouldn't have them and their whole tag-rag and bobtail about my house for something!'
'O, Tom, for shame!' cried Mary, bursting out in the wrath he had intended to excite.
'Ask him which is tag, which rag, and which bobtail,' suggested Ethel.
'Mab, I suppose,' said Gertrude, happily closing the discussion, but it was re-animated by her father's arrival.
'That's a nice girl,' he said, 'very nice; but we must not have her too often in the evening, Mary, without Henry. It is not fair to break up people's home party.'
'Bobber than bobtail,' murmured Tom, with a gesture only meant for Ethel.
'Ave said he would be out till quite late, papa,' said Mary, in self-defence.
'She ought to have been back before him,' said Dr. May. 'He didn't seem best pleased to have found her away, and let me tell you, young woman, it is hard on a man who has been at work all day to come home and find a dark house and nobody to speak to.'
Mary looked melancholy at this approach to reproof, and Tom observed in an undertone,