"Go!" repeat I, panting in horrid surprise, "go where?--to Antigua?" "Yes, to Antigua." No need now to dress my voice in the tones of factitious tragedy--no need to lengthen my face artificially. It feels all of a sudden quite a yard and a half long. Polly has stopped barking: he is now calling, "Barb'ra! Barb'ra!" in father's voice, and he hits off the pompous severity of his tone with such awful accuracy, that did not my eyes assure me to the contrary, I could swear that my parent was in the room. After a moment I rise, throw my arms round Sir Roger, and lay my head on his breast--a most unwonted caress on my part, for we are not a couple by any means given to endearments. "Do not go!" I say in a coaxing whisper, "do nothing of the kind!--stay at home!" "And will _you_ go instead of me?" he asks with a gentle irony, stroking, the while, my plaits as delicately as if he were afraid that they would _come off_, which indeed, _indeed_, they would not. "By myself," say I, laughing, but not raising my head. "Oh! of course; nothing I should like better, and I should be so invaluable in mending the sugar-canes, and keeping the new agent on his P's and Q's, should not I?" He laughs. "Stay!" say I, again whispering, as being more persuasive; "where would be the use of going _now_? It would be shutting the stable-door after the steed was stolen, and--" (this in a still lower voice)--"we are beginning to get on so nicely, too." "Beginning!" he echoes, with a half-melancholy smile, "only _beginning_? have not we always got on nicely?" "And if we are poorer," continue I, insinuatingly, "I believe we shall get on better still. I am sure that poor people are fonder of one another than rich ones--they have less to distract them from each other." I have now raised my head, and perceive that Sir Roger does not look very much convinced. "But granting that poverty _is_ better than riches, do you believe that it _is_, Nancy?--for my part I doubt it--for myself I will own to you that I have found it pleasant not to be obliged to look at sixpence upon both sides; but _that_," he says with straightforward simplicity, "is perhaps because I have not long been used to it--because once, long ago, I wanted money badly--I would have given my right hand for it, and could not get it!" "What did you want it for?" cry I, curiously, pricking my ears, and for a moment forgetting my private troubles in the hope of a forthcoming anecdote. "Ah! would not you like to know?" he says, playfully, but he does not explain: instead, he goes on: "Even granting that it is so, do you think it would be very manly to let a fine estate run to ruin, because one was too lazy to look after it? Do you think it would be quite _honest_--quite fair to those that will come after us?" "_Those that will come after us!_" cry I, scornfully, making a face for the third and last time this morning. "And who are they, pray? Some sixteenth cousin of yours, I suppose?"