Miss Jillgall joined us at the dinner-table, in a state of excitement, carrying a book in her hand.

I am inclined, on reflection, to suspect that she is quite clever enough to have discovered that I hate her—and that many of the aggravating¹ things she says and does are assumed, out of retaliation², for the purpose of making me angry. That ugly face is a double face, or I am much mistaken.

To return to the dinner-table, Miss Jillgall addressed herself, with an air of playful penitence³, to my father.

“Dear cousin, I hope I have not done wrong. Helena left me all by myself. When I had finished darning the curtain, I really didn’t know what to do. So I opened all the bedroom doors upstairs and looked into the rooms. In the big room with two beds—oh, I am so ashamed—I found this book. Please look at the first page.”

My father looked at the title-page: “Doctor Watts’s Hymns⁴. Well, Selina, what is there to be ashamed of in this?”

“Oh, no! no! It’s the wrong page. Do look at the other page—the one that comes first before that one.”

My patient father turned to the blank page.

“Ah,” he said quietly, “my other daughter’s name is written in it—the daughter whom you have not seen. Well?”

Miss Jillgall clasped her hands distractedly. “It’s my ignorance I’m so ashamed of. Dear cousin, forgive me, enlighten me. I don’t know how to pronounce your other daughter’s name. Do you call her Euneece?”

The dinner was getting cold. I was provoked into saying: “No, we don’t.”

She had evidently not forgiven me for leaving her by herself. “Pardon me, Helena, when I want information I don’t apply to you: I sit, as it were, at the feet of your learned father. Dear cousin, is it—”

Even my father declined to wait for his dinner any longer. “Pronounce it as you like, Selina. Here we say Euni’ce—with the accent on the ‘i’ and with the final ‘e’ sounded: Eu-ni’-see. Let me give you some soup.”

Miss Jillgall groaned

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