"For looks I am nowhere, with Nicie present. But he sees advanced intelligence in me. And he comes from where they appreciate it. I shall go back to Old Barn, just when I think right."
"We are coming to something!" cried Doctor Jemmy, who looked pleasantly, but loftily, at all the female race—save Nicie, who was saved perhaps, till two months after marriage—"stay, if you like, where you are appreciated, so highly, so very highly."
Christie's face became red as a rose, for really this was too bad on his part, and after all she had done for him, as witnessed those present.
"They like me," she said in an off-handed manner; "and I like them—which is more than one can do to everybody. But it makes very little difference, I am afraid, for I shall never see them any more, unless they come to Foxden. I had made up my mind to go home, the moment Lady Waldron was out of danger. I did not come here to please myself; and this is all I get for it. Good-bye to fair Perlycross to-morrow! One must not neglect one's dear father and mother, even for—even for such a dear as Nicie."
"Well, I never knew what it was to be out of temper." There was some truth in this assertion, though it seems a large one; for Jemmy Fox had a remarkably sweet temper; and a man who takes stock of himself, when short of that article, has already almost replaced it. "But how will you go, my dear little Cayenne pepper? Will you pack up all your grandeur, and have a coach and four?"
"Yes that I will," answered Christie quick as light, "though it won't cost me quite as much as the one I hired, when I came post-haste to your rescue. The name of my coach is the Defiance; and the Guard shall play 'Roast-beef' all the way, in honour of the coming Christmas-time. Won't we have a fine time at Foxden, if father is in good health again?"
Jemmy wisely left her to her own devices—for she generally "took the change out of him"—and consoled himself with soft contemplation of a lovelier, nicer, and (so far as he knew yet) ten thousand times sweeter-tempered girl, whose name was Nicie Waldron.
Now that sweet creature had a worry of her own, though she did not afflict the public with it. She was dying with anxiety, all the time, to know the contents of her brother Tom's letter, which had so enlivened her dear mother.
It is said that the only thing the all-wise Solomon could not explain to the Queen of Sheba, was the process of her own mind, or rather perhaps the leaps of it, which landed her in conclusions quite correct, yet unsupported even by the shadow of an enthymem. Miss Waldron was not so clever as the Queen of Sheba, or even as Miss Christie Fox; yet she had arrived at a firm conviction that the one, who was destined to solve the sad and torturing question about her dear father, was no other than her brother, Tom Rodrigo. She had observed that his letter bore no token of the family bereavement, neither was that to be expected yet, although six weeks had now elapsed since the date of their sore distress.
Envelopes was not as yet in common use, and a letter was a cumbrous and clumsy-looking thing, one of the many reasons being that a writer was bound by economy, and very often by courtesy as well, to fill three great pages, before he began to double in. This naturally led to a vast sprawl of words, for the most part containing very little; and "what shall I say next?" was the constant enquiry of even the most loving correspondent. Nicie knew well, that her brother was not gifted with the pen of a ready writer, and that all his heart indited of was—"what shall I put, to get done with it?" This increased the value of his letters (by means of their rarity) and also their interest, according to the canon that plenty of range should be allowed for the reader's imagination.