When he was a boy they had often quarrelled, and taxed the efforts of his sister Alice, Lucia's inseparable friend, to reconcile them; but since his long absence at college, and, above all, since Alice's death, they had ceased to torment each other.

The relations of master and pupil had been added to those of playfellows, and their intercourse had run on so smoothly that until to-night Maurice had never known his charge's full power to irritate him.

Like most persons of steady and equable temperament, he felt deeply annoyed, even humiliated, by having been surprised into impatience and anger; he was doubly displeased with himself and with Lucia.

Yet, as he thought of her his mood softened; she was only a child, and would be good to-morrow.
But then she could not always be a child--a girl of sixteen ought to be beginning to be reasonable; and then she did not look such a child.

He had been struck by that idea at one particular moment of this very evening.