'O Papa, but we like you so much better as you are!' cried Geraldine.
'Eh, Cherry!' said Mr. Underwood, 'what say you? Shouldn't you like me better if I were buying that king beech-tree, and all the rest of it?'
Cherry edged nearer, mastered his hand, and looked up in his face with a whole soul of negation in her wistful eyes. 'No, no, no—just as you are,' she whispered.
Some mood of curiosity had come over him, and he turned an interrogative look elsewhere.
Alda spoke. 'Of course, it would be horrid not to be a clergyman; but it is a great shame.'
'No,' said Wilmet, 'it can't be a shame for this cousin Tom to have earned a fortune fairly—if he has; but'—and she pressed her hands tightly together as she looked at the thin worn faces of her parents—'one can't help wishing. Why do things always go hard and wrong?' and the tears dimmed her bright eyes.
'Because—they don't,' said her father, with a half-serious quaintness that vexed her, and forced her to turn away to let the tear drop.
Clement said, in his calm voice, 'How can you be all so repining and foolish!'
And Mr. Underwood, almost in lazy mischief, pursued his experiment. 'Eh, Felix, you are the party most concerned—what say you?'
'Most concerned?' Felix looked up surprised, then recollected himself. 'I don't care,' he said, with an appearance of gruff sullenness; but his father could not content himself without continuing in a semi-teasing tone, 'Don't care—eh? Why, this Centry Underwood once belonged to our family—that's the reason Tom is after it. If I had not scouted old Kedge, you would be prancing about here, a Harrovian, counting the partridges.'