“I am naturally a very common, hard, and businesslike fellow, and terribly selfish. Cobweb had woven herself so round my heart, that in my peevish, irritable way, I was never happy when home from the City without she was waiting on me—filling my pipe, mixing my one nightly glass of grog, upon which the butler frowned—in fact, he had once suggested to me that his late master of an evening always took port.
“Cobweb was very quiet as she glided down from my knee to her hassock at my feet, and was evidently thinking as much as I; and at last I brightened up, for a thought had come to me with a selfish kind of comfort.
“‘She’ll be quite away from all temptations to leave me, there, anyhow,’ I said to myself, as I thought of the ‘at-homes’ and halls to which she was so often receiving invitations.
“This set me talking—fishing, as I called it in my great cunning—to see if there were one of the rocks ahead of which I was in dread.
“‘How shall you be able to leave all your fine friends—parties—and set-outs?’ I said.
“‘Oh, I’m tired of them all!’ she said clapping her hands.
“‘And gay cavaliers, with dandy airs and moustaches, and programmes.’
“‘Ha, ha, ha!’ she laughed merrily; and then, as it seemed to me in my jealous watchfulness, turning the subject, she began to talk about the country place I had taken.
“A fortnight later and we were settled down; and really, spite of all my London notions, I began to find the calm and repose of the country delicious. Cobweb was delighted, and constantly dragging me somewhere or another into the grounds of the pretty old place, where she arranged garden-seats in the snuggest, shadiest spots for my especial behoof.
“As I have said, there was a wilderness of a wood adjoining the garden, which the former possessor had left in a state of nature, saving that he had had the old footpaths and tracks widened in their old winding ways, carefully turfed, and dotted with a chair here and there.