"Nancy," he says, gravely, but in a tone whose gentleness takes all harshness from the words, "you are talking nonsense, and you know as well as I do that you are!" Then I know that I may as well be silent. After a pause: "And when," say I, in as lamentable a voice as King Darius sent down among the lions in search of Daniel--"how soon, I mean, are we to set off?" "_We!_" he cries, a sudden light springing into his eyes, and an accent of keen pleasure into his voice. "Do you mean to say that _you_ thought of coming too?" I look up in surprise. "Do not wives generally go with their husbands?" "But would you _like_ to come?" he asks, seizing my hands, and pressing them with such unconscious eagerness, that my wedding-ring makes a red print in its neighbor-finger. O friends, I wish to Heaven that I had told a lie! It would have been, I am sure, one of the cases in which a lie would have been justifiable--nay, praiseworthy, too. But, standing there, under the truth of his eyes, I have to be true, too. "Like!" say I, evasively, casting down my eyes, and 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."