“So you’ll be ten years old to-morrow, Archie?”
“Yes, father; ten to-morrow. Quite old, isn’t it? I’ll soon be a man, dad. Won’t it be fun, just?”
His father laughed, simply because Archie laughed. “I don’t know about the fun of it,” he said; “for, Archie lad, your growing a man will result in my getting old. Don’t you see?”
Archie turned his handsome brown face towards the fire, and gazed at it—or rather into it—for a few moments thoughtfully. Then he gave his head a little negative kind of a shake, and, still looking towards the fire as if addressing it, replied:
“No, no, no; I don’t see it. Other boys’ fathers may grow old; mine won’t, mine couldn’t, never, never.”
“Dad,” said a voice from the corner. It was a very weary, rather feeble, voice. The owner of it occupied a kind of invalid couch, on which he half sat and half reclined—a lad of only nine years, with a thin, pale, old-fashioned face, and big, dark, dreamy eyes that seemed to look you through and through as you talked to him.
“Dad.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be old really?”
“Wel—,” the father was beginning.
“Oh,” the boy went on, “I should dearly love to be old, very old, and very wise, like one of these!” Here his glance reverted to a story-book he had been reading, and which now lay on his lap.
His father and mother were used to the boy’s odd remarks. Both parents sat here to-night, and both looked at him with a sort of fond pity; but the child’s eyes had half closed, and presently he dropped out of the conversation, and to all intents and purposes out of the company.
“Yes,” said Archie, “ten is terribly old, I know; but is it quite a man though? Because mummie there said, that when Solomon became a man, he thought, and spoke, and did everything manly, and put away all his boy’s things. I shouldn’t like to put away my bow and arrow—what say, mum? I shan’t be altogether quite a man to-morrow, shall I?”
“No, child. Who put that in your head?”
“Oh, Rupert, of course! Rupert tells me everything, and dreams such strange dreams for me.”
“You’re a strange boy yourself, Archie.”
His mother had been leaning back in her chair. She now slowly resumed her knitting. The firelight fell on her face: it was still young, still beautiful—for the lady was but little over thirty—yet a shade of melancholy had overspread it to-night.
The firelight came from huge logs of wood, mingled with large pieces of blazing coals and masses of half-incandescent peat. A more cheerful fire surely never before burned on a hearth. It seemed to take a pride in being cheerful, and in making all sorts of pleasant noises and splutterings. There had been bark on those logs when first heaped on, and long white bunches of lichen, that looked like old men’s beards; but tongues of fire from the bubbling, caking coals had soon licked those off, so that both sticks and peat were soon aglow, and the whole looked as glorious as an autumn sunset.
And firelight surely never before fell on cosier room, nor on cosier old-world furniture. Dark pictures, in great gilt frames, hung on the walls, almost hi