This preamble was quite new, struck off out of his own head from Patty’s text. It was with a great elation and rising self-confidence that Gervase found it so. Perhaps they’d find out that he was not such a fool as he looked--once he had got free. “Eh! what’s the lad saying? That’s true enough--that’s true enough,” Sir Giles said. “Oh, hold your tongue, papa! You don’t know what he’s aiming at,” Lady Piercey said. “And I’ve never seen a thing, nor gone any-place,” said Gervase. “Its d---- d hard upon me--it’s devilish hard. Oh,” he cried, “I can speak up when I like! It’s that dull nobody would stand it (and so it is).” He added his old parentheses, though he had dropped the original theme. “I mustn’t talk a moment with any person, but mother’s down upon me--even Jerry, the ratcatcher, that every one knows.” “That’s true, my boy,” cried Sir Giles, “your mother’s too hard on you; that’s quite true.” “Wait, you fool, till you know what he’s aiming at,” cried Lady Piercey, with her eyes on fire. “And I can’t play your game, father, nor take you for a walk, but there’s a fright all round as if I was going to kill you; and old Dunning after me, looking like a stuck pig.” Here was a chance for Lady Piercey to approve, too, at her husband’s expense; but she was magnanimous, and did not take it. “You’re well meaning enough, Gervase,” she said, “I don’t deny it; but you’re too strong, and you shake poor papa to bits.” “Well, then,” said Gervase, raising his voice to talk her down, “it’s clear as there is nothing here for me to do; and it’s dreadful dull. Enough to kill a man of my age; and the short and the long of it is that I can’t go on like this any more.” He had quite thrown Patty’s carefully prepared speech away, and yet it came breathing over him by turns, checking his natural eloquence. She had never meant him to utter that outcry of impatience, and Gervase would have ruined his own cause, and gone on to say, “I am going to be married,” but for the questions that were suddenly showered upon him, driving him back upon his lesson. “You can’t go on like this? And how are you going on?” cried his mother. “Everything a man can desire, and the best home in England, and considered in every way!” She went on speaking, but her voice was crossed by old Sir Giles’ growl. “What do you want--what do you want?” cried the old man. “Dunning, be off to your supper, and take that woman with you. What do you want--what do you want, you young fool?” “But I know what you want,” Lady Piercey cried, becoming audible at the end of this interruption; “you want what you shall never have as long as I live, unless it’s somebody of my choosing, and not of yours.”