“Reading! you are always reading,” said the woman, as she put a smoking dish on the table, and speaking for the first time. “It’s books, books, from morn to night, and your father encourages you. The books will make thee old before thy time, child, and put no pence in thy father’s pocket.”
“Poor father!” she murmured, and leaning forward, put her arms round his neck. “I wish I could find in the poor, abused books the way to make him rich.”
Gideon had put up his rough hand to caress the white one nestling against his face, but he let his hand drop again and looked at her with a slight cloud on his brow.
“Rich! who wants to be rich? The word is on your lips full oft of late, Una. Do you want to be rich?”
“Sometimes,” she answered. “As much for your sake as mine. I should like to be rich enough for you to rest, and”—looking round the plainly furnished but comfortable room—“and a better house and clothes.”
“I am not weary,” he said, his eyes fixed on her with a thoughtful air of concealed scrutiny. “The cot is good enough for me, and the purple and fine linen I want none of. So much for me; now for yourself, Una?”
“For myself?” she said. “Well, sometimes I think, when I have been reading some of the books, that I should like to be rich and see the world.”
“It must be such a wonderful place! Not so wonderful as I think it, perhaps, and that’s just because I have never seen anything of it. Is it not strange that for all these years I have never been outside Warden?”
“Strange?” he echoed, reluctantly.
“Yes; are other girls so shut in and kept from seeing the world that one reads so pleasantly of?”