“Yes, and he is ever so much better; quite himself again.”
Mrs. Quixano grumbled some inarticulate reply. Personally, she would not have been sorry if he had failed to return from the antipodes.
As may be imagined, she had been one of the first people whom the gossip about Reuben and her daughter had reached.
She had begun to be jealously conscious that there was no one to protect Judith’s interests; that, after all, it might have been better for the girl to take her chance in the Walterton Road, than waste her time among a set of people too greedy or too ambitious to marry her.
Twenty-two, and no sign of a husband; only a troublesome flirtation that kept off the rest of the world, and was not in the least likely to end in anything but smoke.
And yet, thought Mrs. Quixano, with a sudden burst of maternal pride and indignation, any man might be proud of such a wife.
With her beauty, her health, and her air of breeding, surely she was good enough, and more than good enough, for such a man as Reuben Sachs, his enormous pretensions, and those of his family on his behalf notwithstanding?
The door opened presently to admit two little dark-eyed, foreign-looking children—children such as Murillo loved to paint—who had just returned from a walk with a very juvenile nursemaid.
They were Judith’s youngest brothers, and as she knelt on the floor with her arm round one of them, administering chocolate and burnt almonds, she was conscious of a new tenderness, of a strange yearning affection for them in her heart.
“The girls will be so sorry to miss seeing you,” said Mrs. Quixano, taking in the picture before her with her shrewd glance; “they are at the High School, and Jack, of course, is in the City.”