In the plainest terms I put the question to him: "What does your mother's conduct mean ?" Instead of answering, he burst into a fit of laughter--loud, coarse, hard laughter, so utterly unlike any sound I had ever yet heard issue from his lips, so strangely and shockingly foreign to his character as _I_ understood it, that I stood still on the sands and openly remonstrated with him.
"Eustace! you are not like yourself," I said.

"You almost frighten me." He took no notice.

He seemed to be pursuing some pleasant train of thought just started in his mind.
"So like my mother!" he exclaimed, with the air of a man who felt irresistibly diverted by some humorous idea of his own.

"Tell me all about it, Valeria!" "Tell _you_!" I repeated.

"After what has happened, surely it is your duty to enlighten _me_." "You don't see the joke," he said.
"I not only fail to see the joke," I rejoined, "I see something in your mother's language and your mother's behavior which justifies me in asking you for a serious explanation." "My dear Valeria, if you understood my mother as well as I do, a serious explanation of her conduct would be the last thing in the world that you would expect from me.