“Then let’s have it out now, sir, without a shadow of a doubt. Let there be no trying. Wouldn’t you rather that I stayed at home?”
“No, uncle,” came sharply, and almost before the question was uttered.
“Now you, Mark,” cried Sir James.
There was silence again for what seemed a minute, but probably was not half.
“Well, sir, I’m waiting.”
There was another pause, and then as the baronet jerked himself forward in his chair, gazing at his son fiercely as if to drag a reply from his lips, the boy seemed to swallow something, and, as Dean afterwards said to his cousin when talking the matter over, “I could see it go down your throat just as if you were a big bull calf gulping down the cud.”
“I can’t help it, father; something seems to make me say it: I won’t go unless you come too.”
Sir James sank back in his chair, fixing his eyes first upon the doctor, then upon Dean, and lastly upon his son, and it was quite a minute now before he opened his lips to emit a long pent up breath. Then he said, “I must give in, doctor; I’m beaten.”
“And you will come too, father?” cried Mark, and his utterance was full of joyous excitement.
“Yes, my boy; I’ll come.”