“Oh??” Laura could put a good deal into her exclamations. “Oh???”
The knitting needles would slacken for long minutes, till at last, with a click and a gleam, caught from the fire or from Mrs. Cloud’s eyes, hands and voice would pick up the thread.
“I’m afraid he was a bad boy, too. I remember——”
Then Laura would give a sigh of achievement and settle down to listen.
But besides the stories, the interminable stories that a child loves, of other little boys and girls, there was endless amusement in the grown-ups, the drooping ladies and Mr. Mantalini gentlemen, the family groups with pig-tailed children, the crinolines and the bustles, the whiskers and the ringlets, and the pork-pie hats of all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandfathers and great-grandmothers of Justin. It was very interesting: and she learned to refer to them with an air of intimate recollection that staggered Justin one day, when, sprawling by the fire with a college friend and The Scarlet Pimpernel, he told a story, quite a good story, of an émigré who had married a great-aunt or other of his own.
A voice from the window-seat at once reproached him.
“Not your great-aunt, Justin, your mother’s great-aunt, and it was her great-aunt Jane Eleanor, not her great-aunt Emily.”
Justin jumped.
Laura—as usual she was lying flat, her chin in her fists, her heels in the air—turned a page. She was no longer concerned. She had done her duty, and the Arabian Nights was more than absorbing.
“Oh, it was, was it?” said Justin. And then, recovering, “Shut up, Laura. It’s not your Aunt Emily!”