'Look here,' returned Dick, 'I have said good night, and now I'm going.
'Tut, man!' said Dick; 'you're not offended; you're a man of the world, I thought.
Van Tromp laughed gaily, shook hands up to the elbows, hoped cordially they would meet again and that often, but looked after Dick as he departed with a tremor of indignation.
"Not just then, in course, but it's what's bin on his mind and in his talk for days off and on," returned Dick, with a knowing smile and a nod of mysterious confidence.
For the first time in his life Whiskey Dick hesitated between two forms of intoxication.
The delicate compliment to their confidential relations and the slight stimulus of liquor had tremulously exalted Whiskey Dick. Affecting to look cautiously out of the window and around the room, he ventured to draw nearer the young woman with a half-paternal, half-timid familiarity.
'A bat might see that, with the sun shining,' said Dick.
'I should said it was,' replied Dick; 'unless the way in which I put the case to him, made an impression.
'He don't look like it,' said Dick shaking his head, 'but these old people--there's no trusting them, Fred.
"Dick! you here?" he exclaimed, but with no great expression of surprise, after all.
"I have counted positively upon you, my dear Dick, and I have picked you out from all the rest."
"Let us discuss it, then, at breakfast, if you have no objections, my dear Dick."
She can't take
Dick to church, of course--not that he ever troubled church much in his best days.
Dick, with a despondent look upon his papers, and with his hand among his hair again, 'that I never can get that quite right.
Dick, 'and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way.
