mean, how much a year you have. Mercenary as I
am"--(laughing nervously)--"I never thought of asking you; but I
suppose, even if the earth were to open and swallow Antigua--even if
there were no such things as West Indies--we should still have money
enough to buy us bread and cheese, should not we?"

"Well, it is to be hoped so," he answers, a gleam of amusement flashing
like a little sunshiny arrow across his vexation; "it would be a bad
lookout for you and me, would not it, considering the size of our
appetites, if we should not?"

A little pause. Tou Tou's voice again. The anguish has conquered the
laughter, and is now mixed with a shrill treble wrath. Polly is
alternately barking like Vick, and laughing with a quiet amusement at
his own performance.

"Do you think," say I, still airing my opinion with timidity, as one
that has no great opinion of their worth, "that it does one much good to
be rich beyond a certain point?--that a large establishment, for
instance, gives one much pleasure? I am sure it does not in _our_ case;
if you were to know the number of nails that the servants and their
iniquities have knocked into mother's coffin--yes, and father's, too."

"Have they?" (a little absently). He is still pacing up and down
restlessly--to and fro--along and across--he that is usually so innocent
of fidget or fuss. "Nancy," he says, half seriously, half in rueful
jest, "if you want a thing done, do it yourself: mind that, all your
life. I am a standing instance of the disadvantage of having let other
people do it for me. The fact is, I ought to have gone out there long
ago, to look after things myself."

"If you _had_ been there, you could not have stopped the hurricane
coming, any more than Canute could stop the waves," say I, filching a
piece of history from "Little Arthur," and pushing it to the front.

He smiles.

"Not the hurricane--no; but the hurricane was the lesser evil. I might
have done something to avert, or, at least, lessen the greater one. To
tell the truth, I meant to have gone out there this spring--had, indeed,
almost fixed upon a day for starting, when--_you_ stopped me."

"_I!_"

"Yes," he says, pausing in his walk in front of me, and looking at me
with a face full of sunshine, content, and laughter; a face whence
hurricanes, West Indies, and agents have altogether fled; "you called me
a '_beast_', and the expression startled me so much--I suppose from not
being used to it--that it se