‘Oh, no,’ she laughed wickedly, ‘but then Mlle. only understands what she sees with her eyes! She is much too mixed up and educated to know all this kind of thing!’ She made a gesture to include the woods about them. ‘Her sort of knowledge is so stuffing, you know.’
‘Rather,’ he exclaimed. ‘I would far sooner know the trees themselves than know their Latin names.’
It slipped out in spite of himself. The next minute he could have bitten his tongue off. But Nixie took no advantage of him. She let his words pass as something taken for granted.
‘I mean—it’s better to learn useful things while you can,’ he said hurriedly, blushing in his confusion like a child.
Nixie peered steadily down into the water for several minutes before she said anything more.
‘Either she’s found me out and knows everything,’ thought Paul; ‘or she hasn’t found me out and knows nothing.’ But which it was, for the life of him, he couldn’t be certain.
‘Oh,’ she cried suddenly, looking up into his face, her eyes, to Paul’s utter amazement, wet with tears, ‘Oh! how Daddy must have loved you!’
And, before he could think of a word to say, she was gone! Gone into the woods with a fluttering as of white wings.
‘So apparently I am not too mixed up and educated for their exquisite little world,’ he reflected, as soon as the emotion caused by her last words had subsided a little; ‘and the things I know are not of the “stuffing” kind!’
It all made him think a good deal—this attitude the children adopted towards his attitude, this unhesitating acceptance of him in spite of all his pretence. But he still valiantly maintained his studied aloofness of manner, and never allowed himself to overstep the danger line. He never forgot himself when he played with them, and the stories he told were just what they called “ornary” stories, and not tales of pure imagination and fantasy. The rules of the game, finely balanced, were observed between them just as between himself and Mrs. Tompkyns.