“My darling, we have had a very happy time,” he began at last to say to her; “you and I, for many years, suiting one another.”
“To be sure we have, father. And I mean to go on suiting you, for many more years yet.”
Her father saw by the firelight the sadness in her eyes; and he put some gaiety into his own, or tried.
“Lallie, you have brighter things before you—a house of your own, and society, and the grand world, and great shining.”
“Excellent things, no doubt, my father; but not to be compared with you and home. Have I done anything to vex you that you talk like this to me?”
“Let me see. Come here and show me. There are few things I enjoy so much as being vexed by you.”
“There, papa, you are in a hurry to have your usual laugh at me. You shall have no material now. ‘I knows what is right, and I means to do it’—as the man said to me at the turnpike-gate, when he made me pay twice over. Consider yourself, my darling father, saddled for all your life with me.”
Sir Roland loved his daughter’s quick bright turns of love, and filial passion when her heart was really moved. A thousand complex moods and longings played around or pierced her then; yet all controlled, or at least concealed, by an English lady’s quietude. Alice was so like himself, that he always knew what she would think; and he tried his best to follow the zigzag flash of feminine feeling.
“My dear child,” he said at last: “something has been too much for you. Perhaps that foolish fellow’s story of this mysterious water. A gross exaggeration, doubtless. The finny tribe fast sticking by the gills in the nest of the wood-pigeon. Marry come up! Let us see these wonders. The moon is at the full to-night; and I hear no rain on the windows now. Go and fetch my crabstick, darling.”
“Oh, may I come with you, papa? Do say yes. I shall lie awake all night, unless I go. The moon is sure to clear the storm off; and I will wrap up so thoroughly.”