“Oh, Mr Bayre,” cried she, sweetly, “could you come downstairs a moment? I have something to ask you about the little boy, and whether you’ve heard anything of his parents.”
Bayre having, of course, expressed his ready assent, she retreated with a smile evenly distributed among them all, and left the three young men together. Repton made as if to stab the too lucky Bayre with the bread-knife.
“Villain,” he said, “you deserve to die. But first you shall interview the lady, and we’ll listen outside to see that you don’t take a mean advantage of your visit to the baby’s native haunts.”
Southerley, who was more uneasy than Repton, looked up sullenly.
“Oh, let him go,” said he, in a sort of despair. “May as well be put out of one’s misery at once. Go and ask her to marry you, and, for goodness’ sake, get it quickly over.”
From which Bayre, as he went downstairs, with a brand-new suspicion concerning Miss Merriman in his mind, opined that poor Southerley was as false to his ideal of a woman of genius as the only possible lady-love as he, Bayre, was false to his.
CHAPTER XXI.
PARENTS AND GUARDIANS
Bayre found Miss Merriman in the dining-room, which, with a woman’s taste, she had managed to make very pretty. The shabby leather sofa was covered by a piece of handsome tapestry of subdued tints, and the cottage piano stood out from the wall in the modern manner, adorned with a handsome embroidered back, and with a vase of flowers on one corner.
There was a work-basket, too, in the room, and there was a most dainty cot, in which the baby boy lay asleep.
The gas was not alight, but a little table lamp, with a pretty shade, was standing on a small table which had a woman’s work upon it, too far from the cot for the light to fall upon the sleeping infant.