“Your apology is accepted, Jack. But how could I know you’d be good to a live dog if you had one? He would have to be considered as well as you. They tell me you break all your toys. I’d hate to see the spirit of a good dog broken. How can I be sure——”
“But I tell you I would be good to him. Don’t I keep my word to you, John? I’d never have spilled the fishes except that I had given in to ’Lores about Dick. Oh, you don’t know about ’Lores yet!”
The boy it was who brought them again face to face. Dolores had reëntered the living-room. John Cabot stopped beside the center table—stopped and looked across at her. Just what his look meant—superstition, disapproval, fear—she could not be sure. Her heart beat uncomfortably while she waited for him to speak.
“I was told down-stairs that a new governess had come,” he said, after what seemed a long time. “I didn’t understand that it was you.”
“And I didn’t understand that the position was offered by you,” she replied. “If you are displeased, Mr. Cabot, I will give up—Jack.”
“But I won’t give her up, John, even if she is a woman-governess. She knows games that I never heard about. If you’ll just get me an Airedale now——”
The child’s demands broke the strain of the moment. John Cabot offered his hand. The faint smile of his reassurance disappeared from his lips when he read on the tiling the continuation of Jack’s story of the gold-fish. Dolores studied him. Although a shadow lowered over his eyes at this evidence of the evil temper of his son, he gave her an impression of great kindness and great suppression. He looked like what he really was—which, she had noticed, most men do not.
“I am afraid, my boy, that I could not trust a live dog to you,” he said.
He was restoring the last of the stranded aquatics to comfort within the bowl when a lilting laugh surprised the three. Mrs. Cabot, evidently recovered from her headache, was watching them.