Nancy | Page 9

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 smiling broadly now. The shade has fled away, and only sunshine remains.
"And what for yourself? you seem to have forgotten yourself!"
"For myself!" I echo, in surprise, "I have been telling you--you cannot have been listening--all these things are for myself."
Again he has turned his face half away.
"I hope you will get your wish," he says shortly and yet heartily.
I laugh. "That is so probable, is not it? I am so likely to fall in with a rich young man of weak intellect who is willing to marry all the whole six of us, for that is what he would have to do, and so I should explain to him."
Sir Roger is looking at me again with an odd smile--not disagreeable in any way--not at all hold-cheap, or as if he were sneering at me for a simpleton, but merely odd.
"And you think," he says, "that when he hears what is expected of him he will withdraw?"
Again I laugh heartily and rather loudly, for the idea tickles me, and, in a large family, one gets into the habit of raising one's voice, else one is not