“But may not Eric take her?”
“Uncle Charlie must decide that question: if he has no objections to travelling with an animal that is never out of mischief, I suppose Eric may take charge of her.”
“But then, mamma, Eric will be gone a whole long year—”
“And as you have lived nine whole long years,” interrupted her mother, smiling, “without a monkey, or a desire for one, don’t you think you could survive the separation?”
Nettie didn’t then think she could; but a while after, when Froll chased her with a paint-brush dripping wet with red paint, and then completely spoiled a pretty landscape view that Herbert was painting for her, she changed her mind, and decided that a voyage from Hamburg to New York with such an uncontrollable creature would be, to say the least, inconvenient.
To be sure, papa was to meet them at the Hague, and he might be willing to look to her safe transportation across the Atlantic; but she had not much faith in this argument, and, making a virtue of necessity, resigned herself with becoming grace to her mother’s wishes.
Looking back upon the pleasant summer months at Castle Wernier, the children thought time had never gone so quickly. They were soon to be parted from each other, and their pleasant German home and every object took a new interest to them.
“The value of a thing is never known till we have lost it,” Herbert said, sorrowfully, thinking how lonely Adele and he would become when parted from their companions.
“Nor how dear a place an old castle is, until we are forced to leave it,” said Eric.
“I remember thinking once,” said Nettie, “that this place was horrible. It was when we were all so frightened about the ghost.”