“Is Mr. Godfrey's bequest.”
“But depending on Sir Stafford to pay or not, as he likes.”
“I have already told you, sir, that he conceives he has no option in the matter; and that the mere expression of a desire on Mr. Godfrey's part becomes to him a direct injunction.”
“Faith, he was mighty long in finding it out, then,” said Dalton, laughing.
“I believe I have explained myself on that head,” replied Prichard; “but I am quite ready to go over the matter again.”
“God forbid! my head is 'moidered' enough already, not to make it worse. Explanations, as they call them, always puzzle me more; but if you 'd go over the subject to my daughter Nelly, her brain is as clear as the Lord Chancellor's. I'll just call her up here; for, to tell you the truth, I never see my way right in anything till Nelly makes it out for me.”
Mr. Prichard was probably not grieved at the prospect of a more intelligent listener, and readily assented to the proposition, in furtherance of which Dalton left the room to seek his daughter. On descending to the little chamber where he had left the two girls in waiting beside the dwarf's sick-bed, he now discovered that they had gone, and that old Andy had replaced them, a change which, to judge from Hansel's excited looks and wild utterance, was not by any means to his taste.
“Was machst du hier?” cried he, sternly, to the old man.
“Whisht! alannah! Take a sleep, acushla!” whined old Andy, as, under the delusion that it was beside an infant his watch was established, he tried to rock the settle-bed like a cradle, and then croned away in a cracked voice one of his own native ditties:
“I saw a man weeping and makin' sad moan,
He was crying and grievin',
For he knew their deceiving
An' rockin' a cradle for a child not his own.”