"How good you are." After a moment's careful, scrutiny of my face: "I can see the traces of very black thoughts, Mr. Smart,—and recent ones."
"They were black until I came into this room," I confessed. "Now they are rose-tinted."
She bent her slender body a little toward me and the red seemed to leap back into her lips as if propelled by magic. Resolutely I put my awkward, ungainly arms behind my back, and straightened my figure. I was curiously impressed by the discovery that I was very, very tall and she very much smaller than my memory recorded. Of course, I had no means of knowing that she was in bedroom slippers and not in the customary high-heeled boots that gave her an inch and a half of false stature.
"Your mother is here," I remarked hurriedly.
She glanced toward my bedroom door.
"Oh, what a night!" she sighed. "I did all that I could to keep her out of your bed. It was useless. I did cry, Mr. Smart. I know you must hate all of us."
I laughed. "'Love thy neighbour as thyself,'" I quoted. "You are my neighbour, Countess; don't forget that. And it so happens that your mother is also my neighbour at present, and your brothers too. Have you any cousins and aunts?"
"I can't understand how any one can be so good-natured as you," she sighed.
The crown of her head was on a level with my shoulder. Her eyes were lowered; a faint line of distress grew between them. For a minute I stared down at the brown crest of her head, an almost ungovernable impulse pounding away at my sense of discretion. I do take credit unto myself for being strong enough to resist that opportunity to make an everlasting idiot of myself. I knew, even then, that if a similar attack ever came upon me again I should not be able to withstand it. It was too much to expect of mortal man. Angels might survive the test, but not wingless man.
All this time she was staring rather pensively at the second button from the top of Poopendyke's coat, and so prolonged and earnest was her gaze that I looked down in some concern, at the same time permitting myself to make a nervous, jerky and quite involuntary digital examination of the aforesaid button. She looked up with a nervous little laugh.