“Can she talk much?”
“I’m afraid she can talk a great deal too much,” Nancy laughed. “Being with grown-up people all the time has made her a very precocious little girl, I’m afraid.”
She was wondering how she could manage to keep the conversation trained on Letizia until she could muster up the courage to ask her brother-in-law the favour she desired.
“I think it’s such a pity to let children grow up too soon,” Caleb sighed in a remote and dreamy tone that trembled like the vox humana stop with the tears of things. “I like all little things so much; but I think people and animals deteriorate when they grow big. I had a dear little cream-coloured kitten, and now that lovely little kitten has grown into an enormous hulking cat and spends all its time in the kitchen, eating. I noticed when I was going through the household books that we were getting extra fish, so I went into the matter most carefully, and do you know....” The horror of the story he was telling overcame Caleb for a moment, and he had to gulp down his emotion before he could proceed. “Do you know I found that they were actually buying special fish for this great cat?” His voice had sunk to an awe-struck whisper. “It came as a terrible shock to me that such a pretty little tiny kitten which only seemed to lap up a small saucer of milk every now and then should actually have become an item in the household expenditure nowadays.... Of course,” he added hastily, “I told the cook she had no business to give it anything except scraps that couldn’t be used for anything else. But still....” Caleb allowed his narrative to evaporate in a profound sigh.
“Bram spoke of you just before he died,” Nancy began abruptly.
“How very kind of him,” Caleb observed, reassuming quickly that expression of devout and wide-eyed sentimentality, though in the tone of his voice there was an implication of the immense gulf between Bram’s death and his own life.
“He seemed to regret the breach between himself and his family,” she continued.
“It was always a great grief to us,” Caleb observed. He was still apparently as gently sympathetic; yet somehow Nancy had a feeling that behind the wide-eyed solemnity there was a twinkle of cunning in the grey shallow eyes, a lambent twinkle that was playing round the rocky question of what she was leading up to, and of how he should deal with any awkward request she might end by making.
“He was anxious that I should bring Letizia to see you all,” Nancy pressed.
There was a reproach in her brother-in-law’s gaze that made her feel as if she were being utterly remorseless in her persistency. Nevertheless, Caleb turned on quite easily that cordial welcoming smile.