"Yes, _I_; why is that so surprising?"

"What possible concern is it of _yours_?" ask I, throwing the reins on the neck of my indignation, and urging that willing steed to a sharp gallop, crimsoning as I speak, and raising my voice, as has ever been our immemorial wont in home-broils. "For my part, I never saw any good come of people putting their fingers into their neighbors' pies!"

"Not even if those neighbors are the oldest friends they have in the world?" he says, gently, yet eying with some wonder--perhaps apprehension, for odd things frighten men--the small scarlet scold who stands swelling with ruffled feathers, and angry eyes, winking to keep the tears out of them, before him.

"I thought _father_ was the oldest friend you had in the world!" say I, with a jealous tartness; "you always _used_ to tell us so."

"_Some_ of my oldest friends, then," he answers, looking a little amused, "since you will have me so exact."

"If Mrs. Huntley is the oldest friend you have in the world," say I, acrimoniously, still sticking to his first and most offensive form of expression, and _heavily_ accenting it, "I wonder that you never happened to mention her existence before you went."

"So do I," he says, a little thoughtfully. "I am not much of a friend, am I? but--" (looking at me with that sincere and hearty tenderness which, as long as I am under its immediate influence, always disarms me) "my head was full of other things; and people drop out of one's life so; I had neither seen nor heard of her since--since she married."

("Since she was engaged to you," say I, mentally interlining this statement, "and threw you over because you were not rich enough! why cannot you be honest and say so?") but aloud I give utterance to nothing but a shrewish and disbelieving "Hm!"

A pause. I do not know what Roger is thinking of, but I am following out my own train of thought; the fruit of which is this observation, made with an air of reflection:

"Mr. Huntley is a very rich man, I suppose?"

Roger laughs.

"_Rich!_ poor Huntley! that is the very last thing his worst enemy could accuse him of! why, he was obliged to run the constable two years ago."

"But I suppose," say I, slowly, "that he was better off--_well_ off once--when she married him, for instance?"

"How did you know that?" he asks, a little surprised. "Who told you?

Yes; at that time he was looked upon as quite a _parti_."

"Better off than _you_, I suppose?" say I, still speaking slowly, and reading the carpet. "I mean than you were then?"

Again he laughs.

"He might easily have been that? I had nothing but my younger son's portion and my pay; why, Nancy, I had an idea that I had told you that before."

"I dare say you did," reply I, readily, "but I like to hear it again."

Yet another pause.

"He is badly off _now_, then," say I, presently, with a faintly triumphant accent.

"About as badly off as it is possible to be," answers Roger, very gravely; "that is my business with his wife; she and I are trying to make an arrangement with his creditors, to enable him to come home."

"To come home!" echo I, raising my eyebrows in an artless astonishment; "but if he _does_ come home, what will become of Algy and the _rest of them_?"

"The rest of _whom_?" asks Roger, but there is such a severity in his eye as he puts the question that it is not too much to say I _dare not_ explain. The one thing hated of Roger's soul--the one thing for which he has no tolerance, and on which he brings to bear all the weight of his righteous wrath, is _scandal_. Not even me will he allow to nibble at a neighbor's fame.

"Is she much changed since you saw her last?" pursue I presently, with infantile guilelessness; "was her hair _red_ then? some people say it _used_ to be black!"

I raise my eyes to his face as I put this gentle query, in order the better to trace its effect; but the concern that I see in his countenance is so very much greater than any that I had intended to have summoned that I have no sooner hurled my dart than I repent me of having done it.

"Nancy!" he says, putting one hand under my chin, and stroking my hair with the other--"am I going to have a _backbiting_ wife? Child! child!

there was neither hatred nor malice in the little girl I found sitting at the top of the wall."

I do not answer.

"Nancy," he says again, in a voice of most thorough earnestness, "I have a favor to ask of you--I know when I put it _that way_, that you will not say 'No;' if you do not mind, I had rather you did not abuse Zephine Huntley!--for the matter of that, I had rather you did not abuse any one--it does not pay, and there is no great fun in it; but Zephine _specially_ not."

"Why _specially_?" cry I, breathing short and speaking again with a quick, raised voice. "I know that it is a bad plan abusing people, you need not tell me _that_, I know it as well as you do, and I never did it at home, before I married, _never_!--none of them ever accused me of it--I was always quite good-natured about people, _quite_; but why _she specially_? why is she to be more sacred than any one else?"

"It is an old story," he answers, pa.s.sing his hand across his forehead with what looks to me like a rather weary gesture and sighing, "I do not know why I did not tell you before--did not I ever?--no, by-the-by, I remember I never did; well, I will tell you now, and then you will understand!"

"Do not!" cry I, pa.s.sionately, putting my fingers in my ears, and growing scarlet, while the tears rush in mad haste to my eyes, for I imagine that I well know what is coming. "I do not want to hear! I had rather not! I _hate_ old stories." He looks at me in silent dismay. "I mean," say I, seeing that some explanation is needed, "that I know all about it!--I have heard it already! I have been told it."

"Been told it? By whom?"

"Never mind by whom!" reply I, removing my fingers from my ears, and covering with both hot hands my hotter face. "I _have_ been told it! I _have_ heard it, and, what is more, I _will not hear it again_!"

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

When I rose this morning, I did not think that I should have cried before night; indeed, nothing would have seemed to me so unlikely. Cry!

on the day of Roger's first back-coming! absurd! And yet now the morning is still quite young, and I have wept abundantly.

I am always rather good at crying. Tears with me do not argue any very profound depth of affliction. My tears have always been somewhat near my eyes, a fact well known to the boys, whom my pearly drops always leave as stolid and unfeeling as they found them. But the case is different with Roger. Either he is ignorant, or he has forgotten the facility with which I weep, and his distress is proportioned to his ignorance.

My eyes are dried again now, though they and my nose still keep a brave after-glow; and Roger and I are at one again. But, for my part, on this first day, I think it would have been pleasanter if we had never been at two. However, smiling peace is now again restored to us, and no one, to look at us, as we sit in my boudoir after breakfast, would think that we, or perhaps I should say I, had been so lately employed in chasing her away. As little would any one, looking at the blandness of Vick's profile, as she slumbers on the window-seat in the sun, conjecture of her master-pa.s.sion for the calves of strangers' legs.

"So you see that I _must_ go, Nancy," says Roger, with a rather wistful appeal to my reason, of whose supremacy he is not, perhaps, quite so confident as he was when he got up this morning. "You understand, don't you, dear?"

I nod.

"Yes, I understand."

I still speak in a subdued and snuffly voice, but the wrath has gone out of me.

"Well, you--would you mind," he says, speaking rather hesitatingly, as not quite sure of the reception that his proposition may meet with--"would you mind coming with me as far as Zephine's?"

"Do you mean come all the way, and go in with you, and stay while you are there?" cry I, with great animation, as a picture of the strict supervision which, by this course of conduct, I shall be enabled to exercise over Mrs. Zephine's oscillades, poses, and little verbal tendernesses, flashes before my mind's eye.

Roger looks down.

"I do not know about _that_," he says, slowly. "Perhaps she would not care to go into her husband's liabilities before a--a str--before a third person!"

"Two is company and three is none, in fact," say I, with a slight relapse into the disdainful and snorting mood.