“Well, wife, there is no one that tries a man so badly as his own wife does. I am pretty well known for speaking my mind too plainly, more than too doubtfully. I can’t say the same to you, as I should have to say to anybody else; because you are my wife, you see, and have a good right to be down upon me. And so I am forced to get away from things that ought to be argued. But about my daughter, I have a right to think my own opinion; while I leave your own to you, as a father has a right with a mother. And all I say is common-sense. Our Mabel belongs to a time of life when the girls are always dreaming. And then you may say what you like to them mainly; and it makes no difference. Now she looks very pale, and she feels very queer, all through that young sort of mischief. But let her get a letter from Master Hilary—and you would see what would come over her.”
“I have got it! I have got it!” cried a young voice, as if in answer, although too sudden of approach for that. “Father, here it is! Mother, here it is! Long expected, come at last! There, what do you think of that now?”
Her face was lit with a smile of delight, and her eyes with tears of gladness, as she stood between her astonished parents, and waved in the air an open letter, fluttering less (though a breeze was blowing) than her true heart fluttered. Then she pressed the paper to her lips, and kissed it, with a good smack every time; and then she laid it against her bosom, and bowed to her father and mother, as much as to say—“You may think what you like of me—I am not ashamed of it!”
The Grower pushed two grey curls aside, and looked up with a grand amazement. Here was a girl, who at dinner-time even would scarcely say more than “yes,” or “no;” who started when suddenly spoken to, and was obliged to clear her mind to think; who smiled now and then, when a smile was expected, and not because she had a smile,—in a word, who had become a dull, careless, unnatural, cloudy, depressed, and abominably inconsistent Mabel—a cause of anxiety to her father, and of recklessness to herself—when lo, at a touch of the magic wand, here she was, as brave as ever!
The father, and the mother also, knew the old expression settled on the darling face again; the many family modes of thinking, and of looking, and of loving, and of feeling out for love, which only a father and a mother dearly know in a dear child’s face. And then they looked at one another; and in spite of all small variance, the husband and the wife were one in the matter of rejoicing.
It was not according to their schemes, and they both might still be obstinate. But by a stroke their hearts were opened—wise or foolish, right or wrong,—what they might say outside reason, they really could not stop to think. They only saw that their sweet good child, for many long months a stranger to them, was come home to their hearts again. And they could have no clearer proof than this.
She took up her father’s pipe, and sniffed with a lofty contempt at the sealing-wax (which was of the very lowest order), and then she snapped it off and scraped him (with a tortoiseshell handled knife of her own) a proper place to suck at. And while she was doing that, and most busy with one of her fingers to make a draught, she turned to her mother with her other side, as only a very quick girl could do, and tucked up some hair (which was slipping from the string, with a palpable breach of the unities) and gave her two tugs, in the very right place to make her of the latest fashion; and then let her know, with lips alone, what store she set on her opinion. And the whole of this business was done in less time than two lovers would take for their kissing!
“You have beaten me, Popsy,” said Mrs. Lovejoy, fetching up an old name of the days when she was nursing this one.
“Dash me!” cried the Grower; “you shall marry Old Harry, if you choose to set your heart on him.”
