Chapter Two.
The Smile.
“My own Velvetina!”
“Sep, my pet!”
“Can it really be?”
“Even so.”
A silence, during which a pair of tangled eyelashes are dim with humid dew. Then—
“Did you meet daddy on the cliff, pet?”
He turned ashy white, even in the darkness, and recoiled several yards at the unexpected inquiry.
“Where?” at last he gasped, prevaricatingly.
“Then you saw him not!” cried she, “and he is out alone on this wild night; and only his thin socks on.”
“Really?” replies Sep, “let me go and look for him.”
He crushed her lily hand lovingly in his own and went. But he turned to the left at the end of the lane, and with scarcely half a dozen bounds reached the railway station, grasping the map and murmuring to himself, “My Velvy!” all the way.
Any one who could have seen that happy boy’s face at the window of the second-class carriage, as the train steamed majestically out of the station, would scarcely have dreamed of the deep meaning concealed beneath that ingenuous smile.
Smile on, Septimus, yet beware! The sleuth-hound is already on the track!