“So we are whistled away, like poodles for a walk, and that kind of thing! Well, I suppose, uncle, you are right, though I can't see that I'm quite so docile a creature. But if my poor sex is so willing to be won, I don't know how you are to excuse your solitary state, considering how very little trouble it would have taken to make some poor creature happy.”
“A very fair retort!” laughed Uncle David. And he added, in a changed tone, for a sudden recollection of his own early fortunes crossed him—“But even when the right man does come, it does not always follow, Miss Alice, that he dares make the sign; fate often interposes years, and in them death may come, and so the whole card-castle falls.”
“I've had a long talk,” he resumed, “with Richard; he has made me promises, and I hope he will be a better boy for the future. He has been getting himself into money troubles, and acquiring—I'm afraid I should say cultivating—a taste for play. I know you have heard something of this before; I told you myself. But he has made me promises, and I hope, for your sake, he'll keep them; because, you know, I and your father can't last for ever, and he ought to take care of you; and how can he do that, if he's not fit to take care of himself? But I believe there is no use in thinking too much about what is to come. One has enough to do in the present. I think poor Lady May has been disappointed,” he said, with a very cautious smile, his eye having glanced for a moment on her; “she looks a little forlorn, I think.”
“Does she? And why?”
“Well, they say she would not object to be a little more nearly related to you than she is.”
“You can't mean papa—or yourself!”
“Oh, dear, no!” he answered, laughing. “I mean that she misses Dick a good deal.”
“Oh, dear! uncle, you can't be serious!”
“It might be a very serious affair for her; but I don't know that he could do a wiser thing. The old quarrel is still raging, he tells me, and that he can't appear in this house.”
“It is a great pity,” said she.