"Oh, I am glad to know that!" cried Christina. "I always thought the poor lark must have a bad digestion—he was up so early!"
Ian refused to finish the poem, although Mercy begged hard.
The next time they came, he proposed to "read something in Miss Palmer's style," and taking up a volume of Hood, and avoiding both his serious and the best of his comic poems, turned to two or three of the worst he could find. After these he read a vulgar rime about an execution, pretending to be largely amused, making flat jokes of his own, and sometimes explaining elaborately where was no occasion.
"Ian!" said his mother at length; "have you bid farewell to your senses?"
"No, mother," he answered; "what I am doing is the merest consequence of the way you brought us up."
"I don't understand that!" she returned.
"You always taught us to do the best we could for our visitors. So when I fail to interest them, I try to amuse them."
"But you need not make a fool of yourself!"
"It is better to make a fool of myself, than let Miss Palmer make a fool of—a great man!"
"Mr. Ian," said Christina, "it is not of yourself but of me you have been making a fool.—I deserved it!" she added, and burst into tears.