But he was not master of the situations of life. He
pushed his coarse brown moustache upwards, off his lip, and glanced
irritably at his sister, who sat impassive and inscrutable.
'You'll go and stop with Lucy for a bit, shan't you?' he asked. The girl
did not answer.
'I don't see what else you can do,' persisted Fred Henry.
'Go as a skivvy,' Joe interpolated laconically.
The girl did not move a muscle.
'If I was her, I should go in for training for a nurse,' said Malcolm,
the youngest of them all. He was the baby of the family, a young man of
twenty-two, with a fresh, jaunty _museau_.
But Mabel did not take any notice of him. They had talked at her and
round her for so many years, that she hardly heard them at all.
The marble clock on the mantel-piece softly chimed the half-hour, the dog
rose uneasily from the hearthrug and looked at the party at the breakfast
table. But still they sat on in ineffectual conclave.
'Oh, all right,' said Joe suddenly, _a propos_ of nothing. 'I'll get a
move on.'
He pushed back his chair, straddled his knees with a downward jerk, to
get them free, in horsy fashion, and went to the fire. Still he did not
go out of the room; he was curious to know what the others would do or
say. He began to charge his pipe, looking down at the dog and saying, in
a high, affected voice:
'Going wi' me? Going wi' me are ter? Tha'rt goin' further than tha counts
on just now, dost hear?'
The dog faintly wagged its tail, the man stuck out his jaw and covered
his pipe with his hands, and puffed intently, losing himself in the
tobacco, looking down all the while at the dog with an absent brown eye.
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