Nancy | Page 9

find any thing good to eat in it."
"At least, it is sheltered," I answer, shivering, thrusting my hands a
little farther into the warm depths of my muff.
"I was thinking of old days," he says, with a hazy, wistful smile. "Ah!
you have not come to the time of life for doing that yet. Do you know, I
have not been here since your father and I were lads of eleven and
twelve together?"
"You were eleven, and he was twelve, I am sure," say I, emphatically.
"Why?"
"You look so much younger than he," I answer, looking frankly and
unembarrassedly up into his face.
"Do I?" (with a pleased smile). "It is clear, then, that one cannot judge
of one's self; on the rare occasions when I look in the glass it seems to
me that, in the course of the last five years, I have grown into a very old
fogy."
"He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much
seldomer pleased than you do," continued I, mentally comparing the
smooth though weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features
beside me, with the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father's.
"Does he?" he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the
subject had never struck him in that light before. "Poor fellow! I am
sorry if it is so. Ah, you see"--with a smile--"he has six more reasons
for wrinkles than I have."

"You mean us, I suppose," I answer matter-of-factly. "As to that, I
think he draws quite as many wrinkles on our faces as we do on his."
Then, rather ashamed of my over-candor, I add, with hurried bluntness,
"You have never been married, I suppose?"
He half turns away his head.
"No--not yet! I have not yet had that good fortune."
I am inwardly amused at the power of his denial. Surely, surely he
might say in the words of Lancelot:
"Had I chosen to wed, I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine."
"And you?" he asks, turning with an accent of playfulness toward me.
"Not yet," I answer, laughing, "and most likely I shall have to answer
'not yet' to that question as often as it is put to me till the end of the
chapter."
"Why so?"
I shrug my shoulders.
"In moments of depression it strikes Barbara and me, that me and Tou
Tou shall end by being three old cats together."
"Are you so anxious to be married?" he asks with an air of wonder, "in
such a hurry to leave so happy a home?"
"Every one knows best where his own shoe pinches," I answer
vernacularly. "I am afraid that it does not sound very lady-like, but
since you ask me the question, I am rather anxious. Barbara is not: I
am."
A shade of I cannot exactly say what emotion--it looks like
disappointment, but surely it cannot be that--passes across the sunshine
of his face.

"All my plans hinge on my marrying," I continue, feeling drawn, I do
not know how or why, into confidential communication to this almost
total stranger, "and what is more, on my marrying a rich man."
"And what are your plans?" he asks, with an air of benevolent interest,
but that unexplained shade is still there.
"Their name is Legion," I answer; "you will be very tired before I get to
the end of them."
"Try me." "Firstly then," say I, narratively, "my husband must have a
great deal of interest in several professions--the army, the navy, the
bar--so as to give the boys a helping hand; then he must have some
shooting--good shooting for them; for them all, that is, except Bobby!
never shall he fire a gun in my preserves!"
My mind again wanders away to my vengeances, and I break off.
"Well!"
"He must also keep two or three horses for them to hunt: Algy loves
hunting, but he hardly ever gets a day. He is so big, poor dear old boy,
that nobody ever gives him a mount--"
"Yes?"
"Well, then, I should like to be able to have some nice parties--dancing
and theatricals, and that sort of thing, for Barbara--father will never
hardly let us have a soul here--and to buy her some pretty dresses to set
off her beauty--"
"Yes?"
"And then I should like to have a nice, large, cheerful house, where
mother could come and stay with me, for two or three months at a time,
and get clear away from the worries of house-keeping and--" the
tyranny of father, I am about to add, but pull myself up with a jerk, and
substitute lamely and stammeringly "and--and--others."

"Any thing else?"
"I should not at all mind a donkey-carriage for Tou Tou, but I shall not
insist upon that."
He is