There stood the small, thin form, a little more shrivelled and bent, there was the familiar face, a good deal more wrinkled, but otherwise little altered. It was surmounted by a bonnet almost as gay as that which, in Robin's childhood, had diverted his attention in church by its gaudy wreath of artificial flowers. There was exactly the same inquisitive expression in the narrow slits of eyes, but the lashes had become white, for eye-lashes are not so easily dyed as hair on head or brows.
"Miss Petty, are you really going to India?" asked Harold, with unaffected surprise; he had almost added "at your age," but happily checked himself ere the words passed his lips. Poor Miss Petty indulged herself in a dream of perpetual youth, from which it would have been discourteous to have awakened her.
"You wonder at my having the courage to cross the sea, but you see I had a reason, a very particular reason," said Miss Petty in a confidential tone, which she was fond of assuming. "My dear friend, Lady O'More—you have of course heard of Sir Patrick O'More—very distinguished man—in high command—had to leave her only child in England last year, on account of measles or mumps, or something of the catching kind of illness. Now Lady O'More wants to have her Shelah with her—such a fond mother, you know; and she could not trust the darling to anyone but me, so I consented, as guardian, you understand, to my dear friend's child, to take her under my care as far as Bombay."
The Hartleys did not inquire whether the friendship, now first heard of by them, was a mere formal correspondence concerning what was really a simple matter of business, Miss Petty, for a consideration, undertaking to play the nurse to a baronet's child. If they guessed this, their guess was not far from the truth, for Miss Petty was so much accustomed to exaggeration, to giving out fiction as fact, merely because she wished it to be so, that her mind had gradually lost all power to discriminate between false and the true. As some persons have no sense of smell, so had she none of the delicate spiritual perception of—and disgust at falsehood, possessed those of sensitive conscience. Miss Petty had not the warning of danger which such perception bestows.
"But what are you going to India for?" inquired Miss Petty, looking up curiously at the tall, graceful, intellectual man whom she had known in his boyhood and early youth.
"I am going out as a missionary," was Harold's reply.
"Oh, dear! What a pity! You might have done much better in England!"
"I do not think so," said Harold.
"I am certain of it," cried Miss Petty. "I saw in the 'Times' that you had taken honours, and come out a double First. You might in time have been a Lord Chancellor, or a Lord Mayor, and have ridden in your carriage and four. Missionaries are as poor as rats, no one thinks anything of them, they ain't in society, you know! You would have done ever so much better for yourself, had you remained at home."
Harold answered with a smile, "I am quite contented with my lot."