Tom glowed with pleasure. "Did he say that?" he said, eagerly; then he laughed. "Suppose a year ago any one had told me I should blush with pride at praise for sledging! By-the-way, I want to remind you, Joan, you mustn't yawn in his lordship's face this evening when you begin to get sleepy. If I know him, he wouldn't like it at all, and it's not polite. I've told you that so often, why don't you stop it?"
"I can't," said Joan, sorrowfully. "I have tried to close my mouth and let it go out at my ears, as you said, but I feel as if I were turning inside out like a popcorn."
"You had better turn inside out than be rude, Aunt Milly would tell you. Joan, do you know we have both changed in this year? Here we are, you sniffing at Aunt Jane's housekeeping, and I at Aunt Milly's eternal little fixings. I don't say that was nice of us, but it does mark a change. You know we have thought our respective aunts perfection."
Joan looked troubled, and was attempting an explanation—she could not think so fast as Tom—when the front door opened, and her father's voice announced the arrival of their expected guest. Joan paused to give a quick glance around the room. Everything was ready: the dinner, she knew, prepared to serve in a moment; the baby in bed; the little boys—externally—in perfect order. "Tom, do you think they'll behave decently?" she asked, with a young mother's anxious glance at the boys.
"I don't see why they should," Tom rejoined, cheerfully—"they never have."
"Indeed, Tom, Robert sometimes makes me doubt the efficacy of prayer. Every night he asks God to make him a good boy, but I don't see any improvement in him. Do you?"
Joan spoke earnestly, but Tom laughed. "Don't you worry, Joan. Uncle is a man of the world: he always understands everything."
If Bishop Hegan did not understand everything, he understood a great deal with no questions asked, and he nodded silent congratulations to his brother across the dinner table. When the meal was ended the Bishop said:
"I think I will go to bed with the chickens and the children," said Bishop Hegan. "I am a tired man to-night. Tom—young Tom, I mean—suppose you come help me to take off my apron. Lord Bishops wear aprons, Tom, don't they?" He looked at his nephew with a twinkle in his eye.
"I don't know, sir; I never unfrocked one before," retorted Tom, and then gasped at his own audacity. He would never have ventured so reckless a jest with his father. The Bishop was different somehow—more like himself, and in a degree like Aunt Milly. As he led his uncle to his room, Tom felt with a pleasurable excitement that it was to be a brief return to the world from his work-a-day life.