“This is very good of you, Miss Batchelor,” said he.  “I hope you’ll come in and see my wife.”

Miss Batchelor played nervously with her card-case.

“I—­I—­Would your wi—­would Mrs. Tyson care to see me?”

He smiled again.  “I think I can answer for that.”

And to her own intense surprise, for the first and last time Miss
Batchelor crossed the threshold of Thorneytoft.

They found the little woman sitting in her drawing-room with her hands before her, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not smile at Miss Batchelor as she greeted her.  Perhaps with her feminine instinct and antipathy, she felt that Miss Batchelor had not come to see her.  So she smiled at her husband, and the smile was gall and wormwood to the clever woman; it had the effect, too, of bringing back to her recollection the occasion on which she had last seen Mrs. Nevill Tyson smiling.  She wondered whether Mrs. Nevill Tyson also recalled the incident.  If she did she must find the situation rather trying.

Apparently Mrs. Nevill Tyson was so happily constituted that to her trying situations were a stimulant and a resource.  She prattled to Miss Batchelor about her new side-saddle, and her “friend, Captain Stanistreet”—­any subject that came uppermost and dragged another with it to the surface.

Miss Batchelor was very kind and sympathetic; she took an interest in the saddle; she assured Mrs. Nevill Tyson that Drayton Parva had been much concerned on her account; and she asked to see the baby.

The next instant she was sorry she had done so, for Tyson, who had continued to be charming, went out of the room when the baby came in.

The child was laid in Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s lap, and she looked at it with a gay indifference.  “Isn’t he a queer thing?” said she.  “He isn’t pretty a bit, so you needn’t say so.  Nevill calls him a boiled shrimp, and a little rat.  He is rather like a little rat—­a baby rat, when it’s all pink and squirmy, you know, and its eyes just opened—­they’ve got such pretty bright eyes.  But I’m afraid baby’s eyes are more like pig’s eyes.  Well, they’re pretty too.  As he’s so ugly I expect he’s going to be clever, like Nevill.  They say he’s like me.  What do you think?  Look at his forehead.  Do you think he’s going to be clever?”

“It depends,” said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor’s habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they came.

“Well—­he’s very small.  Just feel how small he is.”

Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.