"And me too, Roland," cried eager Nelly, dancing in and out amid the impromptu visitors in the highest glee, her shining curls never still.
"Of course you," said Roland to the fair child who had come to an anchor before him, flinging her arms upon his knees. "I'd not go anywhere without you, you know, Nelly. If I were not engaged to somebody else, I'd make you my little wife."
"Who is the somebody else? Kitty?"
"Not Kitty. She's too little."
"Let it be me, then."
Roland laughed, and looked across at Hamish. "If I don't ask you for her, I may for somebody else. So prepare."
"I'm sure, I hope, Roland, if ever you do marry, that you'll not be snappish with your wife and little girls, as your brother is with us," interposed Winny with a sob. "I think it is something in Mr. Channing's book that has put him out today. As soon as it came this morning, he locked himself in the room alone with it, and never came out for hours; but when he did come--oh, was he not in a temper! He pushed Winnifred and she fell on the carpet, and he shook Rosy till she cried; and nobody knows for what. I'm sure they are like mice for quietness when he's there; they are too much afraid of him to be otherwise."
It was well for Gerald Yorke that he committed no grave crimes; for his wife, in her childish simplicity, in her inability to bear in silence, would be safe to have betrayed them. She was right in her surmises--in fact, Winny, with all her silliness, had a great deal of discernment--that the cause of her husband's temper being worse than usual was Hamish Channing's book. Seizing upon it when it came, Gerald locked himself up with it, forbidding any interruption in terms that might not be disobeyed. On the surface alone he could see that it was no sham book: Gerald's book had about twenty lines in a page, and the large, wide, straggling type might have been read a mile off. This was different: it was closely printed, rather than not, as if the writer were at no fault for matter. In giving a guinea and a half for this work, the public would not find itself deluded into finding nothing to read. Gerald sat down. He was about to peruse this long-expected book, and he devoutly hoped to find it bad and worthless.
But, if Gerald Yorke could not write, he could appreciate: and with the first commencing pages he saw what the work really was--rare, good, of powerful interest; essentially the production of a good man, a scholar, and a gentleman.
As he read on and on, his brow grew dark with a scowl, his lips were angrily bitten: the book, properly noticed, would certainly set the world a-longing: and Gerald might experience some difficulty in writing it down. The knowledge did not tend to soften his generally ill-conditioned state of mind, and he flung the last volume on the table with a harsh word. Even at that early stage, some of the damnatory terms he would use to extinguish the book passed through his active brain.