"You are come to seek your fortune, no doubt:" (he winked on me again as
he said this, to draw attention to his discretion); "and there is
nothing else in the world but that, no doubt, that brings you to
England." (He said this with an evident irony that even a child would
have understood.) "Not that you have not a very pretty fortune already:
I understand that it is near upon a thousand pounds a year; and great
estates in Normandy too, when you shall be twenty-eight years old. I am
right, am I not?"

Now he was right; but I wondered that he should take such pains to know
it all.

"There or thereabouts," I said.

"That condition of twenty-eight years is a strange one," he went on.
"Now what made your poor father fix upon that, I wonder?"

I told him that my father held that a man's life went by sevens, and
that every man was a boy till he was twenty-one, a fool till he was
twenty-eight, and a man, by God's grace, after that.

"Ah, that was it, was it?" he said, stretching his legs yet further. "I
have often wondered as to how that was."

And that shewed me that his mind must have run a good deal upon my
fortunes; but as yet I did not understand the reason.

When, presently, my Cousin Dorothy had shut the door of her room, and
my man was gone down again to the horses, he began again on his old
tack.