"I can feel it is my boy," she said, winding her shawl tightly round her; "come to him, Marcus, come to our long-lost child."
"Don't make a fool of yourself," growled Sir Marcus, bluntly; he had suddenly resigned his position in the middle of the room, and was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa instead; "he's only been away two years, and there's no more chance of his being lost than there is of your going on a five-mile walk."
He felt he had fired a double shot by his remark; but there came a yell from the children on the doorstep, and his wife swept out of the room with theatrical movements, and Sir Marcus felt more uncomfortable than before.
"Leave him to me, children; let me have my boy's first kiss," cried Lady Raleigh, in the hall.
"Just look," said the practical Helen, from the window: "he has hired Bunce's best trap, and we haven't paid his bill for two quarters."
Lady Joan sat, and turned over the leaves of a magazine with her eyes discreetly lowered, and wished that the means of escape were not so completely cut off, and that she could get into the garden. Family jars were intensely amusing to her critical nature; but after a whole day of them she felt that she could reasonably dispense with any more just now, and, from the Squire's attitude, another storm was evidently brewing.
"Hadn't you better come out, sir?" suggested Digby.
"No, sir, I will not come out," answered Sir Marcus, with a show of determination. "Have I not already told you that I have done with the rascal forever? I meant what I said, sir, and I will not see him nor speak to him; he—he can go to some one else to pay his debts!"
And, unconscious that he had put more feeling into the end of his speech than into anything else he had said, the Squire looked at his son and his daughter as if vaguely imploring them to support him in the step he had taken. In his most impetuous actions Sir Marcus always looked for a supporter. Yet, much as Digby admitted the justice of his father's anger, and much as Helen might censure the prodigal herself, there was too much of the esprit de corps in them that ran through the blood of all the Raleighs and made them a formidable enemy to the outsider, to allow them to acquiesce in the Squire's resentment; and he shifted his ground a little and tried another stratagem.
"Don't you see the trouble and the misery that is coming upon me through the extravagance of this young scamp? How is it you are so short-sighted, so dense about it? I tell you he is ruining me, this Jack you are all so fond of; and in ruining me he is taking the bread out of your own mouths, and out of the mouths of your brothers and sisters. Hey? Do you see now?"