"Excuse me; but the circumstances of my visit here are too painful to allow me to wish for society."
And Mr. Briggs withdrew, evidently glad to escape.
"Has he vampoosed with the contents of a till, that he wishes so for solitude?" asked Tom; and, shouldering his carpet-bag a second time, with a grim inward laugh, he went to his father's house, and hung up his hat in the hall, just as if he had come in from a walk, and walked into the study; and not finding the old man, stepped through the garden to Mark Armsworth's, and in at the drawing-room window, frightening out of her wits a short, pale, ugly girl of seventeen, whom he discovered to be his old playfellow, Mary. However, she soon recovered her equanimity: he certainly never lost his.
"How d'e do, darling? How you are grown! and how well you look! How's your father? I hadn't anything particular to do, so I thought I'd come home and see you all, and get some fishing."
And Mary, who had longed to throw her arms round his neck, as of old, and was restrained by the thought that she was grown a great girl now, called in her father, and all the household; and after a while the old Doctor came home, and the fatted calf was killed, and all made merry over the return of this altogether unrepentant prodigal son, who, whether from affectation, or from that blunted sensibility which often comes by continual change and wandering, took all their affection and delight with the most provoking coolness.
Nevertheless, though his feelings were not "demonstrative," as fine ladies say now-a-days, he evidently had some left in some corner of his heart; for after the fatted calf was eaten, and they were all settled in the Doctor's study, it came out that his carpet-bag contained little but presents, and those valuable ones—rare minerals from the Ural for his father; a pair of Circassian pistols for Mark; and for little Mary, to her astonishment, a Russian malachite bracelet, at which Mary's eyes opened wide, and old Mark said—
"Pretty fellow you are, to go fooling your money away like that. What did that gimcrack cost, pray, sir?"
"That is no concern of yours, sir, or mine either; for I didn't pay for it."
"Oh!" said Mary, doubtingly.
"No, Mary. I killed a giant, who was carrying off a beautiful princess; and this, you see, he wore as a ring on one of his fingers: so I thought it would just suit your wrist."