This had happened just six weeks ago, and now Ida and her half-brother were wandering about among the ferny hollows and breezy heights of the park, or roving off to adjacent heaths and hills, and it seemed almost as if they had lived there all their lives. Vernon had been quick to make himself at home in the stately old house, rummaging and foraging in every room, routing out all manner of forgotten treasures, riding his father's old rocking-horse, exploring stables and lofts, saddle-rooms, and long-disused holes and corners, going up ladders, climbing walls, and endangering life and limbs in every possible way which infantine ingenuity could suggest.
'Mamma, however could we live so long in that horrid little house in France?' he demanded one day, as he prowled about his mother's spacious morning-room in the autumn dusk, dragging fine old folios out of a book shelf in his search for picture-books, while Lady Palliser and her stepdaughter sat at tea by the fire.
The lady of the house gave a faint sigh.
'I don't know, Vernie,' she said. 'I almost think I was happier there than I am here. It was a poor little place, but I felt it was my own house, and I never feel that here.'
'It will be my house when papa's dead,' replied Vernon, cheerfully, seating himself on the ground in front of the broad bay window and turning over Gell's 'Pompeiiana'; 'everything will be mine. Is that why you don't feel as if it was yours now?'
'No, Vernie, that's not it. I hope it will be a great many years before your father is taken away.'
'But you don't think so,' argued Vernon. 'You told him the other day that if he did not walk more, and take less champagne, he would soon kill himself.'
'But I didn't mean it, darling. I only spoke for his good. The doctor says he must take no champagne, or only the dryest of the dry.'
'What a silly that doctor must be!' interrupted Vernon; 'all wine is wet.'
'The doctor meant wine that is not sweet, dear.'