“He’s very tired—he has run about all day. He ought to be quiet till he goes to bed. Otherwise he won’t sleep.” These declarations fell successively and gravely from Mrs. Ambient’s lips.
Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and looked at him in silence. The vicaress gave a genial, irrelevant laugh, and observed that he was a precious little pet “Let him choose,” said Mark Ambient. “My dear little boy, will you go with me or will you stay with your mother?”
“Oh, it’s a shame!” cried the vicar’s lady, with increased hilarity.
“Papa, I don’t think I can choose,” the child answered, making his voice very low and confidential. “But I have been a great deal with mamma to-day,” he added in a moment.
“And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you have chosen!” And Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.
His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent upon the ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that I felt as if almost any remark from my own lips would be a false note. But Mrs. Ambient quickly recovered herself, and said to me civilly enough that she hoped I did n’t mind having had to walk from the station. I reassured her on this point, and she went on, “We have got a thing that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.”
“That gave me the pleasure of a walk with him,” I rejoined.
She was silent a minute, and then she said, “I believe the Americans walk very little.”
“Yes, we always run,” I answered laughingly.
She looked at me seriously, and I began to perceive a certain coldness in her pretty eyes. “I suppose your distances are so great?”