“Come in to have a look how the crèche you have started here is getting along?” he asked, shaking hands. “My authority in this house is seemingly a negligible quantity, judging from my wife’s act in setting up an orphanage during the brief hours of my absence. She wants to stick to them too.”
“I do hope,” Pamela said, laughing, “that you won’t find them a great nuisance. It is such a comfort to me to leave them here. But I had qualms about you when Connie proposed it.”
“That’s more than she had,” he replied.
“They are fairly good on the whole, you will find,” she said dubiously.
“Every mother thinks that,” he retorted. “I don’t doubt they are as troublesome as the general run of youngsters. They were here five minutes ago, and all over me. Blest, if they don’t seem more at home than I am. Your daughter is a forward little hussy, and as pretty as—well, as her mother. What!”
He smiled at her encouragingly, and leaned with his back against the rail of the stoep, observing her as she stood bareheaded beside him, with only a light wrap over her thin dress.
“So you are going to Pretoria?” he said. “I hope you will find your husband better when you get there. If you want any arrangements made at this end, I’ll see to it. I suppose you intend to bring him down?”
“I hope to,” Pamela answered a little doubtfully. “It depends on—on circumstances.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “No good hurrying him. We’ll look after the youngsters all right. You need not have them on your mind, anyway.”
“No,” she said, with a quick look of gratitude at him. “You have relieved me of that worry entirely.”