"He might easily have been that? I had nothing but my younger son's portion and my pay; why, Nancy, I had an idea that I had told you that before."
"I dare say you did," reply I, readily, "but I like to hear it again."
Yet another pause.
"He is badly off now, then," say I, presently, with a faintly triumphant accent.
"About as badly off as it is possible to be," answers Roger, very gravely; "that is my business with his wife; she and I are trying to make an arrangement with his creditors, to enable him to come home."
"To come home!" echo I, raising my eyebrows in an artless astonishment; "but if he does come home, what will become of Algy and the rest of them?"
"The rest of whom?" asks Roger, but there is such a severity in his eye as he puts the question that it is not too much to say I dare not explain. The one thing hated of Roger's soul—the one thing for which he has no tolerance, and on which he brings to bear all the weight of his righteous wrath, is scandal. Not even me will he allow to nibble at a neighbor's fame.
"Is she much changed since you saw her last?" pursue I presently, with infantile guilelessness; "was her hair red then? some people say it used to be black!"
I raise my eyes to his face as I put this gentle query, in order the better to trace its effect; but the concern that I see in his countenance is so very much greater than any that I had intended to have summoned that I have no sooner hurled my dart than I repent me of having done it.
"Nancy!" he says, putting one hand under my chin, and stroking my hair with the other—"am I going to have a backbiting wife? Child! child! there was neither hatred nor malice in the little girl I found sitting at the top of the wall."