The listening boy gave a grunt here, as much as to say “But he strikes me though!”
“Those are some of the pictures of what is past, Charley.”
“Cut away again,” said the boy, “and give us a fortune-telling one; a future one.”
“Well! There am I, continuing with father and holding to father, because father loves me and I love father. I can’t so much as read a book, because, if I had learned, father would have thought I was deserting him, and I should have lost my influence. I have not the influence I want to have, I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I go on in the hope and trust that the time will come. In the meanwhile I know that I am in some things a stay to father, and that if I was not faithful to him he would—in revenge-like, or in disappointment, or both—go wild and bad.”
“Give us a touch of the fortune-telling pictures about me.”
“I was passing on to them, Charley,” said the girl, who had not changed her attitude since she began, and who now mournfully shook her head; “the others were all leading up. There are you—”
“Where am I, Liz?”
“Still in the hollow down by the flare.”
“There seems to be the deuce-and-all in the hollow down by the flare,” said the boy, glancing from her eyes to the brazier, which had a grisly skeleton look on its long thin legs.