"That if you were agreeable"--continued Joshua.
"That if I was agreeable," repeated Mr. Marvel.
"And if you would please to give your consent"--said Joshua, purposely prolonging his preamble.
"And if I would be pleased to give my consent," repeated Mr. Marvel with a slight chuckle of satisfaction.
"That as we love each other very much, we would like to get married."
"That's dutiful," said Mr. Marvel, laying down his pipe, oracularly. "I'm only agreeable, Josh, because I am old, and because I am married. As I said to mother the other night, when we was talking the matter over--ah! you may stare; but we knew all about it long ago. Didn't we, mother? Well, as I was saying to mother the other night, if I was a young man, and mother wasn't in the way, I'd marry her myself and you might go a-whistling. Shiver my timbers, my lass!" he cried, breaking through the trammels of wood-turning, and becoming suddenly nautical, "come and give me a kiss."
Which Ellen did; and so the little comedy ended happily. Joshua, having a right now to sit with his arm round Ellen's waist, availed himself of it, you may be sure. If Ellen went out of the room, he had also a right to go and inquire where she was going; and this, curiously enough, happened four or five times during the night. If any thing could have added to the happiness of Mr. Marvel--except being any thing but a wood-turner, which, at his age, was out of the question--it was this proceeding of Joshua's. Every time Joshua followed Ellen out of the room; Mr. Marvel looked at his wife with pleasure beaming from his eyes.
"It puts me in mind of the time when I came a-courting you, mother," he said. "How the world spins round! It might have been last night when you and me were saying good-by at the street-door."
Mrs. Marvel had not spoken to her husband without cause of the change that had taken place in Basil Kindred. A very remarkable change had indeed taken place in him. A mistrustful expression had settled itself upon his face, accompanied by a keen hungry watchfulness of all that occurred around him. He gave short answers, and was snappish and morose. Yet not a look, not a word, not a gesture escape his notice. He did not avoid his friends; he rather courted their society. He repelled their advances, but he sat among them, watching. Every sense was employed in that all-absorbing task. What was it that he was trying to discover?
The change was so sudden. A few days ago he was as he had ever been hitherto, frank and cheerful,--even gay sometimes. Now, all that was gone. In place of frankness, mistrust; in place of cheerfulness, gloom. Susan was the only one, with the exception of his daughter, to whom he did not speak with a certain bitterness. His manner to all the others was as though some sensitive chord in his nature had been sorely wounded--as though all men were his foes--as though his faith in what was good and noble in human nature had been violently disturbed.