“Yes, thank Heaven!”
“And I too, and Roland, and little Blanche! Why, then, you are right to thank Heaven, for your true treasures are untouched. But sit down and explain, pray.”
“I cannot explain. I do not understand anything more than that he, my brother—mine!—has involved Austin in—in—” (a fresh burst of tears.)
I comforted, scolded, laughed, preached, and adjured in a breath; and then, drawing my mother gently on, entered my father’s study.
At the table was seated Mr. Squills, pen in hand, and a glass of his favorite punch by his side. My father was standing on the hearth, a shade more pale, but with a resolute expression on his countenance which was new to its indolent, thoughtful mildness. He lifted his eyes as the door opened, and then, putting his finger to his lips, as he glanced towards my mother, he said gayly, “No great harm done. Don’t believe her! Women always exaggerate, and make realities of their own bugbears: it is the vice of their lively imaginations, as Wierus has clearly shown in accounting for the marks, moles, and hare-lips which they inflict upon their innocent infants before they are even born. My dear boy,” added my father, as I here kissed him and smiled in his face, “I thank you for that smile! God bless you!” He wrung my hand and turned a little aside.
“It is a great comfort,” renewed my father, after a short pause, “to know, when a misfortune happens, that it could not be helped. Squills has just discovered that I have no bump of cautiousness; so that, craniologically speaking, if I had escaped one imprudence, I should certainly have run my head against another.”
“A man with your development is made to be taken in,” said Mr. Squills, consolingly.
“Do you hear that, my own Kitty? And have you the heart to blame Jack any longer,—a poor creature cursed with a bump that would take in the Stock Exchange? And can any one resist his bump, Squills?”
“Impossible!” said the surgeon, authoritatively.
“Sooner or later it must involve him in its airy meshes,—eh, Squills?—entrap him into its fatal cerebral cell. There his fate waits him, like the ant-lion in its pit.”