nd fiddling uneasily
with one of the buttons of his coat, "it is hardly a question of
'_like_,' is it? I do not imagine that you _like_ it much yourself?--one
cannot always be thinking of what one likes."

The pressure of his fingers on mine slackens; and, though, thanks to my
wedding-ring, it was painful, I am sorry. After a minute:

"But you have not," say I, trying to speak in a tone of light and airy
cheerfulness, "answered my question yet--how soon we must set off? You
know what a woman always thinks of first--her _clothes_, and I must be
seeing to my packing."

"The sooner the better," he answers, with a preoccupied look. "Not later
than ten days hence!"

"_Ten days!_"

Again my jaw falls. He has altogether loosed my hands now, and resumed
his walk. I sit down by the table, lean my elbows on it, and push my
fingers through my hair in most dejected musing. Polly has been dressing
himself; turning his head over his shoulder, and arranging his feathers
with his aquiline nose. He has finished now, and has just given vent, in
a matter-of-fact, unemotional voice, to an awful oath! There is the
sound of brisk feet on the sunny gravel outside. Bobby's face looks in
at the window--broad, sunburnt, and laughing.

"Well! what is up now?" cries he, catching a glimpse of my disconsolate
attitude. "You look as if the fungi had disagreed with you!"

"Then appearances are deceitful," reply I, trying to be merry, "for they
have not."

He has only glanced in upon us in passing: he is gone again now. I
rebury my hands in my locks, which, instead of a highly-cultivated
garden, I am rapidly making into a wilderness.

"I suppose," say I, in a tone which fitly matches the length of my face,
"that Bobby will have got a ship before I come back; I hope they will
not send him to any very unhealthy station--Hong-Kong, or the Gold
Coast."

"I hope not."

"What port shall we sail from?"

"Southampton."

"And how long--about how long will the voyage be?"

"About seventeen days to Antigua."

"And how long"--(still in the same wretched and resignedly melancholy
voice)--"shall we have to stay there?"

"It depends upon the state in which I find things?"

A good long pause. My elbows are growing quite painful, from the length
of time during which they have been digging into the hard _marqueterie_
table, and my hair is as wild as a red Indian's. _Ten_ days! ten little
galloping days, and then _seventeen_ long, slow, monstrous o