“Oh, you did! Nicely moped and miserable you’ll be here, if he goes to London for months on the stretch. You did not think of that, perhaps.”
“But he would not leave me here,” said Barbara, her eyelashes becoming wet at the thought, as she unconsciously moved to her husband’s side. “He would take me with him.”
Miss Carlyle made a pause, and looked at them alternately.
“Is that decided?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” laughed Mr. Carlyle, willing to joke the subject and his sister into good-humor. “Would you wish to separate man and wife, Cornelia?”
She made no reply. She rapidly tied her bonnet-strings, the ribbons trembling ominously in her fingers.
“You are not going, Cornelia? You must stay to dinner, now that you are here—it is ready—and we will talk this further over afterward.”
“This has been dinner enough for me for one day,” spoke she, putting on her gloves. “That I should have lived to see my father’s son throw up his business, and change himself into a lazy, stuck-up parliament man!”
“Do stay and dine with us, Cornelia; I think I can subdue your prejudices, if you will let me talk to you.”
“If you wanted to talk to me about it, why did you not come in when you left the office?” cried Miss Corny, in a greater amount of wrath than she had shown yet. And there’s no doubt that, in his not having done so, lay one of the sore points.