“Precious lucky for me too.”
“Look here, Uncle Seward,” said the girl, gravely. “Don’t talk any more about old fogeys and it being heavy and slow for me, and all that. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but it’s—er—it’s bosh.”
Mervyn burst into a wholehearted laugh. The answer, and, above all, the look which accompanied it, the tone in which it was made, relieved him beyond measure.
“Is it? Very well, little one. We won’t talk any more—bosh. How’s that?”
“‘That’ is. So we won’t. Yes, we’ll get her down here at Easter,”—and then the girl broke off suddenly and looked graver still.
“Listen to me, Uncle Seward, and how I am running on,” she said. “Any one would think I had come here to live, instead of for a rest until I can find another job. And Easter is a long way off, and—”
“And? What then?” he interrupted. “Of course you have come here to live. Do you think I’m going to let you go wasting your young life bearleading a lot of abominable brats while I’ve got a shack that’ll hold the two of us? Well, I’m not, then. How’s that?”
Melian looked embarrassed, and felt it.
“Uncle Seward,” she urged at last. “You said you were—poor—more than once. Well, is it likely I’m going to sponge on you for all time? It’s delightful to be here with you, while I’m picking up again, but—”
“‘But’,”—and again he interrupted. “My dear child, I see through it all. You are going on the tack of the up-to-date girl, wanting to be independent. There’s a sort of grandiloquent, comforting smack about that good old word ‘independent,’ isn’t there? Well, you can be just as independent as you like here. You can take entire charge. You can order me about as you want to—I don’t say I shall obey, mind—but I shan’t complain. Well, if you go bearleading some woman’s cubs they won’t do the first, and they’ll do the last ad lib. Now then. Which is the lesser evil?”