“I wish you would be more open with me, Moray,” said Lucy to her brother.
He was gazing through one of his glasses intently upon some celestial object, for the night was falling fast, and first one and then another star came twinkling out in the cold grey of the north-east.
Alleyne raised his head slowly and looked at his sister’s pretty enquiring face for a few moments, and then resumed his task.
“Don’t understand you,” he said quietly.
“Now, Moray, you must,” cried Lucy, pettishly; “you have only one sister, and you ought to tell her everything.”
As she spoke, in a playful, childish way, she began tying knots in her brother’s long beard, and made an attempt to join a couple of threads behind his head, but without result, the crisp curly hairs being about half-an-inch too short.
Alleyne paid no heed to her playful tricks for a time, and she went on,—
“If I were a man—which, thank goodness, I am not—I’d try to be learned, and wise, and clever, but I’d be manly as well, and strong and active, and able to follow all out-door pursuits.”
“Like Captain Rolph,” said Alleyne, with a smile, half reproach, half satire.
“No,” cried Lucy, emphatically; “he is all animalism. He has all the strength that I like to see, and nothing more. No, the man I should like to be, would combine all that energy with the wisdom of one who thinks, and uses his brains. Captain Rolph, indeed!”