“Yes,” hesitated Bruno, with an involuntary shiver, as he glanced around them upon those furiously boiling clouds, then cast an eye upward, towards yonder clear sky. “Yes, but—in what manner?”
“What'll we do when the cyclone goes bu'st?” cut in Waldo, with disagreeable bluntness. “It can't go on for ever, and when it splits up,—where will we be then?”
“I wish it lay within my power to give you full assurance on all points, my dear boys,” the professor made reply. “I only wish I could ensure your perfect safety by giving my own poor remnant of life—”
“No, no, uncle Phaeton!” cried the brothers, in a single breath.
“How cheerfully, if I only might!” insisted the professor, his homely face wearing an expression of blended regret and unbounded affection. “But for me you would never have encountered these perils, nor ever—”
Again he was interrupted by the brothers, and forced to leave that regret unspoken to the end.
“Only for you, uncle Phaeton, what would have become of us when we were left without parents, home, fortune? Only for you, taking us in and treating us as though of your own flesh and blood—”
“As you are, my good lads! Let it pass, then, but I must say that I do wish—well, well, let it pass, then!”
A brief silence, which was spent in gripping hands and with eyes giving pledges of love and undying confidence; then Professor Featherwit spoke again, in an entirely different vein.
“If nothing else, we have exploded one fallacy which has never met with contradiction, so far as my poor knowledge goes.”