"That throws a great deal of light on the matter, does it not?" says Algy, ironically.
"Nancy!" cries Bobby, seizing both my hands, and looking me in the face with an air of irritated determination, "if you do not this moment stop sighing like a windmill and tell us what is up, I will go to Sir Roger, hanged if I will not, and ask him what he means by making you cry yourself to a jelly!"
At this bold metaphor applied to my own appearance, the tears begin again to start to my eyes.
"Do not!" cry I, eagerly, catching at his wrists in detention, "it was not his fault! he could not help it; but" (mopping first one eye and then the other, and finishing by a dolorous blast on my nose) "but I am so disappointed, every thing is so changed, and I know I shall miss him so much!" I end with a break in my voice, and a long whimper.
"Miss him! miss whom?"
"The ge-general!" reply I, indistinctly, from the recesses of a drenched pocket-handkerchief.
"But what is going to happen to him? where is he going to? I wish that you would be a little more intelligible," cry they all, impatiently.
"He is going to the West Indies, to Antigua," reply I, lifting my face and speaking with a slow dejection.
"To Antigua!" cries Algy; "but what in the world is going to take him there?"
"Perhaps," says Bobby, in a loud aside to Tou Tou, "perhaps he has got another wife out there—a black one—and he thinks it is her turn now!"