“How exceedingly clumsy of me! how could it
have happened? I beg your pardon ten thousand
times.”
In his words there is polite remorse and solicitude;
in his face only a friendly mirth. He is old,
that is clear. Had he been young, he would have
said, with that variety and suitability of epithets
so characteristic of this generation:
“I am awfully sorry! how awfully stupid of me!
what an awful duffer I am!”
The gas is shining in its garish yellow brightness
full down upon us, as we stand together, illuminating
my plain, scorched face, the slatternly looseness
of my hair, and the burnt hole in my gown.
“You will have to give me another,” I
say, looking up at him and smiling. I should
not have thought of saying it if he had been a young
man, but with a vieux papa one may be at one’s
ease.
“There is nothing in the world I should like
better,” he says, with a sort of hurry and eagerness,
not very suggestive of a vieux papa; “but
really—” (seeing me look rather ashamed
of my proposition)—“is it quite
hopeless? the damage quite irremediable?”
“On the contrary,” reply I, tucking my
gathers in, with a graceful movement, at the band
of my gown, “five minutes will make it as good
as new—at least” (casting a disparaging
eye over its frayed and taffy-marked surface), “as
good as it ever will be in this world.”
A little pause.
“I suppose I have lost my way,” he says,
thinking, I fancy, that I look rather eager to be
gone. “I am never very good at the geography
of a strange house.”
“Yes,” say I, promptly; “you came
through our door, instead of your own; shall
I show you the way back?”
“Since I have come so far, may not I come a
little farther?” he asks, glancing rather longingly
at the half-open school-room door, whence sounds of
pious mirth are again beginning to reissue.
“Do you mean really?” ask I, with
a highly-dissuasive inflection of voice. “Please
not to-night; we are all higgledy-piggledy—at
sixes and sevens! To tell you the truth, we have
been cooking. I wonder you did not smell
it in the drawing-room.”
Again he looks amused.
“May not I cook too? I can, though
you look disbelieving; there are few people that can
beat me at an Irish stew when I set my mind to it.”
A head (Bobby’s) appears round the school-room
door.
“I say, Nancy, who are you colloquing with out
there? I believe you have got hold of our future
benefact—”
An “oh!” of utter discomfiture, and the
head is withdrawn.
“I am keeping you,” Sir Roger says.
“Well, I will say good-night. You will
shake hands, won’t you, to show that you bear
no malice?”
“That I will,” reply I, heartily stretching
out my right hand, and giving his a cordial shake.
For was not he at school with father?
