“I hope Uncle A. won’t find out,” Rose thought, with the old, apprehensive feeling of half-amused guilt.
In the sitting-room, Uncle Alfred was reading The Pawnbrokers’ Gazette. The boy Felix had already gone downstairs, presumably to Artie Millar’s old sleeping quarters in the shop beside the safe, and Millar himself, the pawnbroker informed his niece, now lived in lodgings at Wimbledon and only came in to business daily.
“Is he married?” Rose inquired. Certain old recollections, that did not amount to emotions, had stirred within her at the sight of her first fancy.
“He is a very God-fearing youth,” said Uncle Alfred, and after a pause sufficient to mark the significance of the word, he added solemnly, “now-a-days. He is not married.”
They exchanged hardly any other conversation, but Rose felt, with a relief as profound as it was inexplicit, that she and her strange, undemonstrative relative were mutually gratified at resuming a tie that, however severely strained by incongruities of temperament, was yet securely founded upon some essential similarity of outlook.
“Whatever else Uncle Alfred is, he’s alive,” Rose reflected. “And those Aviolets at Squires are as dead as mutton—every blessed one of them.”
IX
It appeared paradoxical that, whereas Rose had resented Squires largely on Cecil’s account, she found the familiar life in Ovington Street, agreeable to herself, resented by her little boy.
After the novelty of the first two days, he fretted and was discontented. Rose took him for walks, but when it rained he was obliged to remain in the sitting-room, with no amusement beyond a small musical box that played “Rousseau’s Dream” over and over again, and some old bound numbers of The Quiver.
He missed the garden at Squires, the animals, the rides and drives to which he had become accustomed. As his mother ruefully perceived, he even missed his governess, little Miss Wade. He was not exactly naughty, but lifeless and fretful, and Rose began to see, at first dimly and unwillingly, that her fanciful plan of resuming existence over the pawnbroker’s shop was not destined to mature.