‘And I’m practising my own preaching, am I not?’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘when the time comes you can do as you please. Your father can get along without you one year more.’
‘No, I think I ought to go, for of course he must be lonely but—I should like to stay! It seems more like home than any place I’ve ever been in. I’ve really never belonged anywhere before, and I like so much to be with you.’
‘Poor little girl! You have had a chequered career.’
‘Yes, Uncle Howard, I have; and it keeps on being chequered! I haven’t been in the villa three months, but really I don’t remember ever having lived so long in one place before. It’s been nice, hasn’t it? I hate dreadfully to have it end. It seems like shutting away a whole part of my life that can never come back.’
‘Oh, well, if you feel that way about it, I’ll buy the villa and we can come out every spring. You can bring your father over, and we will dip him in the waters of Lethe, too.’
‘I’m afraid he wouldn’t be dipped,’ she laughed. ‘He’d be running a cable connexion out here and setting up a ticker on the terrace, so that he could watch the stock market as well as the view.’
Mr. Copley’s mouth twitched slightly at the picture.
‘We must all ride our hobbies, I suppose, or the world would be a very dreary world indeed.’
She looked up at him and hesitated.