"After all," answered Mopsy, "we have no more chance of paying weekly than we have of paying monthly or quarterly. Nothing under three years' credit would be any use to us. Something might happen—Fortune's wheel might turn in three years."
"Whenever it does turn it will be the wrong way, and we shall be under it," said Dopsy, still given over to gloom.
It was very delightful to be invited to a fine old country house; but it was bitter to know that one must go there but half provided with those things which civilization have made a necessity.
"How happy those South Sea Islanders must be," sighed Mopsy, pensively meditating upon the difference between wearing nothing, and having nothing to wear.
CHAPTER VI.
"I WILL HAVE NO MERCY ON HIM."
The Buenos Ayres steamer was within sight of land—English land. Those shining lights yonder were the twin lanterns of the Lizard. Leonard and his friend paced the bridge smoking their cigars, and looking towards that double star which shone out as one light in the distance; and thinking that they were going back to civilization—conventional habits—a world which must seem cramped and narrow—not much better than the squirrel's cage seems to the squirrel—after the vast width and margin of that wilder, freer world they had just left—where men and women were not much more civilized than the unbroken horses that were brought out struggling, and roped in among a team of older stagers, to be dragged along anyhow for the first mile or so, rebellious, and wondering, and to fall in with the necessities of the case somehow before the stage was done.
There was no thrill of patriotic rapture in the breast of either traveller as he watched yonder well-known light brightening on the dark horizon. Leonard had left his country too often to feel any deep emotion at returning to it. He had none of those strong feelings which mark a man as the son of the soil, and make it seem to him that he belongs to one spot of earth, and can neither live nor die happily anywhere else. The entire globe was his country, a world created for him to roam about in, climbing all its hills, shooting in all its forests, fishing in all its rivers, exhausting all the sport and amusement that was to be had out of it—and with no anchor to chain him down to any given spot. Yet, though he had none of the deep feeling of the exile returning to the country of his birth, he was not without emotion as he saw the Lizard light broadening and yellowing under the pale beams of a young moon. He was thinking of his wife—the wife whose face he had not seen since that gloomy morning at Mount Royal, when she sat pale and calm in her place at the head of his table—maintaining her dignity as the mistress of his house, albeit he knew her heart was breaking. From the hour of her return from the Kieve, they had been parted. She had kept her room, guarded by Jessie; and he had been told, significantly, that it was not well they should meet.
How would she receive him now? What were her thoughts and feelings about that dead man? The man whom she had loved and he had hated: not only because his wife loved him—though that reason was strong enough for hatred—but because the man was in every attribute so much his own superior. Never had Leonard Tregonell felt such keen anxiety as he felt now, when he speculated upon his wife's greeting—when he tried to imagine how they two would feel and act standing face to face after nearly a year of severance.