'I wish I had been born in those times!' said Betty. And the wish had a meaning in the speaker's mind which the hearer could not divine.
'Why do you wish that?' asked Pitt, smiling.
'I suppose the principal reason is, that then I should not have been born in this. Everything is dreadfully prosy in our age. Oh, not here, at this moment! but this is a fairy tale we are living through. I know how the plain world will look when I go back to it.'
'At present,' said Pitt, taking the Syracusan coin and restoring it to its place, 'you are not an enthusiastic numismatist!'
'No; how should I? Coins are not a thing to excite enthusiasm. They are beautiful, and curious, but not exactly—not exactly stirring.'
'I had a scholar once,' remarked Pitt, as he locked the glass door of the cabinet, 'whose eyes would have opened very wide at sight of this collection. Have you heard anything of the Gainsboroughs, mother?'
Betty started, inwardly, and was seized with an unreasoning fear lest the question might next be put to herself. Quietly, as soon as she could, she moved away from the coin cabinet, and seemed to be examining something else; but she was listening all the while.
'Nothing whatever,' Mrs. Dallas had answered.
'They have not come back to England. I have made out so much. I looked up the family after I came home last fall; their headquarters are at a nice old place down in Devonshire. I introduced myself and got acquainted with them. They are pleasant people. But they knew nothing of the colonel. He has not come home, and he has not written. Thus much I have found out.'
'It is not certain, however,' grumbled Mr. Dallas. 'I believe he has come home; that is, to England. He was on bad terms with his people, you know.'