“I am sure they are pleased to see you always indoors and not spending your time in that dreadful place.” “What dreadful place? That is all you know--I’d never have come home any more but for them that’s there. It was _she_ that sent me to please the old folks. But I shan’t go on much longer if you all treat me like this. I’ve tried my best to make the time pass for them, Meg, to give them a laugh and that. And they huff me and cuff me as if I was a fool. Why do they always call me a fool,” cried the poor fellow with a passing cloud of trouble, “whatever I do?” “Oh, Gervase!” cried Margaret, full of pity. “But why did she want you so particularly to please them just now?” He stared at her for a moment, then laughed and nodded his head. “You’d just like to know!” he said, “but she didn’t mean me to be nice to _you_, Meg; for she’s always afraid I’ll be driven to marry you--though a man must not marry his grandmother, you know.” Margaret repented in a moment of the flush of anger that flew over her. “You can make her mind easy on that point,” she said gravely; “but oh, Gervase, I am afraid it will make them very unhappy if you go on with this fancy; they would never let you bring her here.” “Fancy!” he cried, “I’m going to marry her. You can’t call that a fancy; and if you think you can put me off it, or the whole world!--Get along Meg, _I_ don’t want to talk to you any more.” “But I want very much to talk to you, Gervase.” Gervase looked at her with a smile of foolish complacency. “I dare say you think me silly,” he cried, “but here’s two of you after me. Get along, Meg; whatever I do I’m not going to take your way.” “You must do as you please, then,” said Margaret in despair; “but remember, Gervase,” she said, turning back before she reached the door, “your father is old, and you might drive him into a fit if you go on as you did to-night--and where would you be then?” she added, with an appeal to the better feeling in which she still believed. “Why, I’d be in his place, and she’d be my lady,” cried the young man, with a gleam of cruel cunning, “and nobody could stop me any more, whatever I liked to do.” But next evening there seemed to be in his mind some lingering regard for what she had said. Gervase left his father alone, and devoted himself to his mother, who was more able to take care of herself. He offered to wind her silks, and entangled them hopelessly with delighted peals of laughter. He took her scissors to snip off the ends for her, and put the sharp points through the canvas, until Lady Piercey, in her exasperation, gave him a sudden cuff on his cheek.