Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE. There was something hopeful and exhilarating about the weather next morning, and the servants thought some unexpected piece of good news must have come to Dick during the night, when they heard him whistling to himself over his dressing as light- hearted as a lark. He even felt surprised at himself when he looked in the glass that he was not haggard and heavy-eyed, with black care sitting visibly on his shoulders, touching his hair with grey, and drawing lines round mouth and eyes. On the contrary he looked uncommonly fresh and youthful, but what can you not do when you are young and in good health, and have had a perfectly good night, enlivened with dreams of a capital run with the hounds, when the February sky is blue even through London smoke and there is a breath of spring and violets in the airthat drives away all memory of the fogs that curtained you in only yesterday ? Dick found a note on the breakfast table awaiting him from Uncle Tom, asking him to come round that morning to his house to talk over arrangements, as he had a touch of gout in one foot and could not get down to the bank that day. Dick shrewdly suspected that Uncle Tom's gout was brought on by Aunt Maria's anxiety to be present at any interview that might take place, and by her fixed determination to have a voice, and that a very ruling one, in any arrangements that might be made, and he would much rather have settled it all with Uncle Tom alone in his room at the bank, or in Mr. Murchison's office, with the kind, old lawyer to put everything in its best light. But there was no help for it; gout is a circumstance to which we must all give way. So, breakfast being over, Dick called the little girls to put on their things and come with him. Jenkins came into the ...