Henry grinned broadly. "It sounds like as if it was laughing at me, sir."
"You think so? That will do."
The boy closed the door softly and went away, and the young man murmured, "Just what I thought. They do know. Now, Acadien treelets, gasping your last to throw a gleam of brightness into my lazy life, tell me, is anything worth while? If there had been a curse laid on your ancestors in the forest, would you devote your last five minutes to lifting it?"
The angry gasping and sobbing in the fire had died away. Two of the topmost billets of wood rolled gently over and emitted a soft muttering.
"You would, eh?" said the young man, with a sweet, subtle smile. "You would spend your last breath for the good of your race. You have left some saplings behind you in the forest. You hope that they will be happy, and should I, a human being, be less disinterested than you?"
"Vesper," said a sudden voice, from the doorway, "are you talking to yourself?"
The young man deliberately turned his head. The better to observe the action of the sticks of wood, and to catch their last dying murmurs, he had leaned forward, and sat with his hands on his knees. Now he got up, drew a chair to the fire for his mother, then sank back into his own.
"I do not like to hear you talking to yourself," she went on, in a querulous, birdlike voice, "it seems like the habit of an old man or a crazy person."
"One likes sometimes to have a little confidential conversation, my mother."