"Stay!" say I, again whispering, as being more persuasive; "where would be the use of going _now_? It would be shutting the stable-door after the steed was stolen, and--" (this in a still lower voice)--"we are beginning to get on so nicely, too."

"Beginning!" he echoes, with a half-melancholy smile, "only _beginning_?

have not we always got on nicely?"

"And if we are poorer," continue I, insinuatingly, "I believe we shall get on better still. I am sure that poor people are fonder of one another than rich ones--they have less to distract them from each other."

I have now raised my head, and perceive that Sir Roger does not look very much convinced.

"But granting that poverty _is_ better than riches, do you believe that it _is_, Nancy?--for my part I doubt it--for myself I will own to you that I have found it pleasant not to be obliged to look at sixpence upon both sides; but _that_," he says with straightforward simplicity, "is perhaps because I have not long been used to it--because once, long ago, I wanted money badly--I would have given my right hand for it, and could not get it!"

"What did you want it for?" cry I, curiously, p.r.i.c.king my ears, and for a moment forgetting my private troubles in the hope of a forthcoming anecdote.

"Ah! would not you like to know?" he says, playfully, but he does not explain: instead, he goes on: "Even granting that it is so, do you think it would be very manly to let a fine estate run to ruin, because one was too lazy to look after it? Do you think it would be quite _honest_--quite fair to those that will come after us?"

"_Those that will come after us!_" cry I, scornfully, making a face for the third and last time this morning. "And who are they, pray? Some sixteenth cousin of yours, I suppose?"

"Nancy," he says, gravely, but in a tone whose gentleness takes all harshness from the words, "you are talking nonsense, and you know as well as I do that you are!"

Then I know that I may as well be silent. After a pause:

"And when," say I, in as lamentable a voice as King Darius sent down among the lions in search of Daniel--"how soon, I mean, are we to set off?"

"_We!_" he cries, a sudden light springing into his eyes, and an accent of keen pleasure into his voice. "Do you mean to say that _you_ thought of coming too?"

I look up in surprise.

"Do not wives generally go with their husbands?"

"But would you _like_ to come?" he asks, seizing my hands, and pressing them with such unconscious eagerness, that my wedding-ring makes a red print in its neighbor-finger.

O friends, I wish to Heaven that I had told a lie! It would have been, I am sure, one of the cases in which a lie would have been justifiable--nay, praiseworthy, too. But, standing there, under the truth of his eyes, I have to be true, too.

"Like!" say I, evasively, casting down my eyes, and fiddling uneasily with one of the b.u.t.tons of his coat, "it is hardly a question of '_like_,' is it? I do not imagine that you _like_ it much yourself?--one cannot always be thinking of what one likes."

The pressure of his fingers on mine slackens; and, though, thanks to my wedding-ring, it was painful, I am sorry. After a minute:

"But you have not," say I, trying to speak in a tone of light and airy cheerfulness, "answered my question yet--how soon we must set off? You know what a woman always thinks of first--her _clothes_, and I must be seeing to my packing."

"The sooner the better," he answers, with a preoccupied look. "Not later than ten days hence!"

"_Ten days!_"

Again my jaw falls. He has altogether loosed my hands now, and resumed his walk. I sit down by the table, lean my elbows on it, and push my fingers through my hair in most dejected musing. Polly has been dressing himself; turning his head over his shoulder, and arranging his feathers with his aquiline nose. He has finished now, and has just given vent, in a matter-of-fact, unemotional voice, to an awful oath! There is the sound of brisk feet on the sunny gravel outside. Bobby's face looks in at the window--broad, sunburnt, and laughing.

"Well! what is up now?" cries he, catching a glimpse of my disconsolate att.i.tude. "You look as if the fungi had disagreed with you!"

"Then appearances are deceitful," reply I, trying to be merry, "for they have not."

He has only glanced in upon us in pa.s.sing: he is gone again now. I rebury my hands in my locks, which, instead of a highly-cultivated garden, I am rapidly making into a wilderness.

"I suppose," say I, in a tone which fitly matches the length of my face, "that Bobby will have got a ship before I come back; I hope they will not send him to any very unhealthy station--Hong-Kong, or the Gold Coast."

"I hope not."

"What port shall we sail from?"

"Southampton."

"And how long--about how long will the voyage be?"

"About seventeen days to Antigua."

"And how long"--(still in the same wretched and resignedly melancholy voice)--"shall we have to stay there?"

"It depends upon the state in which I find things?"

A good long pause. My elbows are growing quite painful, from the length of time during which they have been digging into the hard _marqueterie_ table, and my hair is as wild as a red Indian's. _Ten_ days! ten little galloping days, and then _seventeen_ long, slow, monstrous ones!

_Seventeen_ days at sea! seventeen days and seventeen nights, too--do not let us forget that--of that deadly nausea, of that unspeakable sinking of all one's inside to the very depths of creation--of the smell of boiling oil, and the hot, sick, throbbing of engines!

"I hope," say I, in a voice so small that I hardly recognize it for my own, "that I shall not be _quite_ as ill all the way as I was crossing from Calais to Dover; and the steward," continue I, in miserable meditation, "kept telling me all the while what a fine pa.s.sage we were having, too!"

"So we were!"

Another pause. I am still thinking of the horrid theme; living over again my nearly-forgotten agonies.

"Do you remember," say I, presently, "hearing about that Lady Somebody--I forget her name--but she was the wife of one Governor-General of India, and she always suffered so much from sea-sickness that she thought she should suffer less in a sailing-vessel, and so returned from India in one, and just as she came in sight of the sh.o.r.es of England _she died_!"

As I reach this awful climax, I open my eyes very wide, and sink my voice to a tragic depth.

"The moral is--" says Sir Roger, stopping beside me, laying his hand on my chair back, and regarding me with a mixture of pain and diversion in his eyes, "stick to steam!"

CHAPTER XIX.

A heavy foot along the pa.s.sage, a hand upon the door, a hatted head looking in.

"Roger," says father, in that laboriously amiable voice in which he always addresses his son-in-law, "sorry to interrupt you, but could you come here for a minute--will not keep you long."

"All right!" cries Sir Roger, promptly.

(How _can_ he speak in that flippantly cheerful voice, with the prospect of seventeen days' sea before him?)

"Now, where did I put my hat, Nancy? did you happen to notice?"

"It is here," say I, picking it up from the window-seat, and handing it to him with lugubrious solemnity.