“I suppose,” say I, presently, speaking with some diffidence, “that that is all.  Of course I do not mean to say that it is not very bad, but is there nothing worse?”

“Is not it bad enough?” he asks, half laughing.  “What did you expect?”

“You know,” say I, still hesitatingly, “I have not an idea how well off you are; I mean, how much a year you have.  Mercenary as I am”—­ (laughing nervously)—­“I never thought of asking you; but I suppose, even if the earth were to open and swallow Antigua—­even if there were no such things as West Indies—­we should still have money enough to buy us bread and cheese, should not we?”

“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.”