The gravity of both faces lightened when, on reaching the Vicarage, the sounds of childish voices broke upon their ears. Mrs. Meredith Brander prided herself on nothing so much as on being a “sensible woman;” and, as there is no sign of want of sense in a woman so marked as the spoiling of children, the event went a little way in the opposite direction, and kept her little daughter of ten and small son of six in somewhat rigorous subjection. Not only did she honor the old-fashioned saying that “children should be seen and not heard,” but she even went so far as to think that the less seen of them the better. Her husband, who was an affectionate and even demonstrative father, would have had them much more about the house; but he yielded in all domestic matters implicitly to his wife’s ruling, and, as she had decreed that the proper place for children was the nursery, in the nursery they for the most part remained. Therefore, the children had come back in a cab with the luggage, instead of with papa and mamma, in the pony carriage, and they were on their way up the stairs towards their own domain when their father and uncle came in and caught them.
Vernon Brander’s haggard face lighted up with an expression of deep tenderness as the little girl turned on hearing the gentlemen’s footsteps, and, with a shrill cry of childish delight, ran down a few steps, and flung her little arms tempestuously round his neck.
“Uncle Vernie! Uncle Vernie!” she cooed breathlessly into his ear. “Oh, I have such a lot to tell you, and I’ve such a heap of shells for you, and some seaweed for you to dry; and, oh! I have so wanted to see you, and have you with us there by the sea. It would have been lovely if only you’d been there!”
“Come, come, you carneying, blarneying, little sixpenn’orth of halfpence,” said Uncle Vernon, seating himself on the stairs and putting his arm affectionately around her little waist, “don’t pretend it wasn’t lovely without me, or that you’re glad the holiday’s over so that you can see your old uncle again.”
“But I am though, whether you believe it or not,” said the child, gravely, looking into the wrinkles of the clergyman’s face with affectionate solicitude. “The sea was beautiful, and it was nice to have no lessons, and to see the pretty people, and to have new walks instead of the old ones we’re so tired of. But there was no one to tell what one thought, no one to look at me like you look, Uncle Vernie—no one to hug like this.”
And, suiting the action to the word, she crushed up his head and face in a stifling embrace.
At that moment the drawing-room door opened, and Mrs. Brander, handsome, erect, and neat as a statue, came upon the scene.
“Kate, you are forgetting yourself, my dear,” she said, in a tone of gentle but decided reproof. “Your uncle does not mind a kiss, but a bear’s hug is neither lady-like nor welcome.”
The child withdrew her arms at once, and relapsed into the unnatural demeanor of a sensitive child snubbed. Vernon grew red, and passed his hand over the little girl’s fair head with more than paternal tenderness.
“Don’t be hard upon the child, Evelyn,” he said in a low voice. “You who have children of your own don’t know what pleasure that ‘bear’s hug’ can give to a childless man.”