“The wind-gall, too,—has that gone?”
“Going rapidly; a few days' walking exercise will make him perfect.”
“No news of Spicer and his German friend,—though I expected to have had a telegraph all day yesterday. But come, these are not interesting matters for Lizzy,—we 'll have up dinner, and see about a box for the opera.”
“A very gallant thought, papa, which I accept with pleasure.”
“I must dress, I suppose,” said Beecher, half asking; for even yet he could not satisfy his mind what amount of observance was due to the daughter of Grog Davis.
“I conclude you must,” said she, smiling; “and I too must make a suitable toilette;” and, with a slight bow and a little smile, she swept past them out of the room.
“How close you have been, old fellow,—close as wax,—about this,” said Beecher; “and hang me, if she mightn't be daughter to the proudest Duke in England!”
“So she might,” said Grog; “and it was to make her so, I have consented to this life of separation. What respect and deference would the fellows show my daughter when I wasn't by? How much delicacy would she meet with when the fear of an ounce ball wasn't over them? And was I going to bring her up in such a set as you and I live with? Was a young creature like that to begin the world without seeing one man that wasn't a leg, or one woman that wasn't worse? Was it by lessons of robbery and cheating her mind was to be stored? And was she to start in life by thinking that a hell was high society? Look at her now,” said he, sternly, “and say if I was in Norfolk Island to-morrow, where 's the fellow that would have the pluck to insult her? It is true she doesn't know me as you and the others know me; but the man that would let her into that secret would never tell her another.” There was a terrible fierceness in his eye as he spoke, and the words came from him with a hissing sound like the venomous threatenings of a serpent. “She knows nothing of my life nor my ways. Except your own name, she never heard me mention one of the fellows we live with. She knows you to be the brother of Lord Viscount Lack-ington, and that you are the Honorable Annesley Beecher, that's all she knows of you; ain't that little enough?”
Beecher tried to laugh easily at this speech; but it was only a very poor and faint attempt, after all.
“She thinks me a man of fortune, and you an unblemished gentleman; and if that be not innocence, I 'd like to know what is! Of where, how, and with whom we pick up our living, she knows as much as we do about the Bench of Bishops.”