On this particular morning Master Harry Murray hearing the ominous splashing, tumbled out of bed and flattened his gloomy little face against the pane.
“Is it raining?” called Nan, in a most woe-begone voice, from her bed in her own room.
“Raining? I should think so!” Harry called back. “It's raining cats and dogs, and it is not going to stop for a minute all day. Besides, there's an awful fog. It's pretty hard lines, it strikes me, to study all the week with the sun shining bright, and then have it rain on your only holiday. I just wish I could have the managing of things in this old world for a while.”
“I don't, then,” called Nan; “it would be an awful hard world for girls. You wouldn't think of a thing but just what would please the boys.”
Harry did not hear all of this, for he had flounced back into bed, drawing the blanket tight over his head, as though he meant to stay there for the rest of the day at any rate. Soon certain familiar odours, suggestive of a favourite breakfast, began to steal through his room, and his head gradually appeared above the covers, as though he were debating in his mind whether on the whole it would not be better to get up. A moment later the debate came to an end, for he heard his father's voice, and pricking up his ears it was easy enough to hear what he was saying.
“Look here, mother!” were the words that reached him, “the next time Harry is so late to breakfast he must go without it; I mean it, mother. The boy seems to be losing all regard for discipline. You can't manage a boy without discipline, no more'n a crew.”
So it was not strange that Harry no longer questioned the advisability of getting up, but springing out of bed and dressing in a jiffy managed to put in an appearance at the table just as everyone else had finished. Mrs. Murray dropped some cakes on the griddle especially for him, and the lazy little fellow fared much better than he deserved. Mrs. Murray had a very soft spot in her heart for this only boy of hers, and Captain Murray's threat that another time Harry should go fasting set that soft spot to aching, and made her anxious to fortify him against such an emergency by heaping his plate high on this particular morning.
“Now I propose,” said Sister Julia, after breakfast, when the children were moping and growling in the sitting-room, “that we have regular lessons to-day, and then you can take the first clear day as a holiday instead.”
“No, sir-ree,” answered Harry, decidedly. “You don't catch me studying on Saturday for nobody.”
He felt rather ashamed of this speech as soon as it was uttered, but this was not a day when he was going to ask any one's pardon, not he—not even Sister Julia's, though he was very fond of her.