"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 sent the West Indies, yes, and the East ones too, clean out of my head." "I hope," say I, anxiously, "that you will never tell any one that I said _that_. They would think that I was in the habit of calling people '_beasts_', and indeed--_indeed_, I very seldom use so strong a word, _even_ to Bobby." "Well," he says, not heeding my request, not, I am sure, hearing it, and resuming his walk, "what is done cannot be undone, so there is no use whining about it, Nancy" (again stopping before me, and this time taking my face in his two hands). "Will you mind much, or will you not?--do you ever mind _any thing much_, I wonder?" (eagerly and wistfully scanning my face, as if trying to read my character through the mask of my pale skin, and small and unremarkable features). "Well, there is no help for it--as I did not go then, I must go now."