“But you and I are content without her!”
“Are we? I am not sure! Gus your penmanship is perfect; when I am rich, you shall copy my books.”
“How rich?”
“Oh, rich enough to give you all you would ask,” she answered thoughtlessly. “I expect that I shall have to undergo a process as trying as vivisection; but I will not flinch; it is good for me.”
“Don’t read it now; save it for the solitude of the country.”
“No, I am anxious to see it; you can be setting up the chess-men; I don’t want to take you away from father.”
With the color rising in his cheeks, he arose and moved the chess-board nearer; standing before her, he began slowly to arrange the pieces. The three large sheets were closely written; she read slowly, once breaking into a laugh and then knitting her brows and drawing her lips together.
“Are you not pleased? Am I not just?”
“A critic is not a fault-finder, necessarily; you are very plain. I will consider each sentence by itself in my solitude; you are a great help to me, Gus. I thank you very much. You have been a help to me all my life.”
“I have tried to be,” he answered, taking up a castle and turning it in his fingers.