‘Why not?’
‘Because she is not worthy. If she can’t appreciate them, I would let her alone. I once thought better of Eva, but it is very bad company she keeps when she is not here.’
Charles, however, was not sorry when Eveleen came to sit by him, for a bantering conversation with her was the occupation of which he was moat capable. Amy, returning, came and sat in her old place beside him, with her hand in his, and her quiet eyes fixed on the ground.
The last evening for many weeks that she would thus sit with him,—the last that she would ever be a part of his home. She had already ceased to belong entirely to him; she who had always been the most precious to him, except his mother.
Only his mother could have been a greater loss,—he could not dwell on the anticipation; and still holding her hand, he roused himself to listen, and answer gaily to Eveleen’s description of the tutor, Mr. Fielder, ‘a thorough gentleman, very clever and agreeable, who had read all the books in the world; the ugliest, yes, without exaggeration, the most quaintly ugly man living,—little, and looking just as if he was made of gutta percha, Eveleen said, ‘always moving by jerks,—so Maurice advised the boys not to put him near the fire, lest he should melt.’
‘Only when he gives them some formidable lesson, and they want to melt his heart,’ said Charles, talking at random, in hopes of saying something laughable.
‘Then his eyes—‘tis not exactly a squint, but a cast there is, and one set of eyelashes are black and the other light, and that gives him just the air of a little frightful terrier of Maurice’s named Venus, with a black spot over one eye. The boys never call him anything but Venus.’
‘And you encourage them in respect for their tutor?’
‘Oh, he holds his own at lessons, I trow; but he pretends to have such a horror of us wild Irish, and to wonder not to find us eating potatoes with our fingers, and that I don’t wear a petticoat over my head instead of a bonnet, in what he calls the classical Carthaginian Celto-Hibernian fashion.’
‘Dear me,’ said Charlotte, ‘no wonder Philip recommended him.’