"Aye," Tom agreed, "and it isn't so long ago, either. It seemed to me as if the whole county used to be here on a Saturday night."
"I'm thinking," resumed Dan musingly, "of throwing up the business, what's the use of pretending to keep an inn? If it wasn't for mother and for Nancy, I'd clear out, boy; go off and hunt my fortune. As it is, with what I make on the farm and lose on the house, I just pull through the year."
"By gad," exclaimed Tom, "I'd go with you, Dan. I'm tired to my soul with reading law in father's office. Why, you and I haven't been farther than Coventry to the county fair, or to Perth Anhault to make a horse trade. I'd like to see the world, go to London and Paris. I've wanted to go to France ever since that queer Frenchman was here—remember?—and told us those jolly tales about the Revolution and the great Napoleon. We were hardly more than seven or eight then, I guess."
"I would like to go, hanged if I wouldn't," said Dan. "I'm getting more and more discontented. But there's not much use crying for the moon, and France might as well be the moon, for all of me." He relapsed then into a brooding silence. It was hard for an inn-keeper to be cheerful in midwinter with an empty house. Tom too was silent, dreaming vividly, if vaguely, of the France he longed to see.
"Hark!" exclaimed Dan presently. "How it blows! There must be a big sea outside to-night."
He strode to the window, pushed back the curtains of faded chintz, and stared out into the darkness. The wind was howling in the trees and about the eaves of the old inn, the harsh roar of the surf mingled with the noise of the storm, and the sleet lashed the window-panes in fury.
"You will not be thinking of going home tonight, Tom?"
"Not I," Pembroke answered, for he was as much at home in Dan's enormous chamber as he was in his own little room under the roof at the Red Farm.
As he turned from the window, the door into the parlour opened, and a young girl quietly slipped in and seated herself in the chimney-corner.
"Hello, Nance," Dan exclaimed, as she entered; "come close, child; you need to be near the fire on a night like this."