“It 's quite the other way about,” she answered, with a cold little laugh. “It is she who is showing me around. It is her tour. I am the chaperone.” Thorpe dwelt upon the word in his mind. He understood what it meant only in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness of the tone in which it had been uttered.
“No—it didn't seem as if it were altogether—what I might call—YOUR tour,” he ventured. They had seen much of each other these past few days, but it was still hard for him to make sure whether their freedom of intercourse had been enlarged.
The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence, she commented upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a moment he said nothing. He went on then with a renewed consciousness of risk.
“You mustn't be annoyed with me,” he urged. “I've been travelling with that dear little niece of mine and her brother, so long, that I've got into a habit of watching to notice if the faces I see round me are happy. And when they're not, then I have a kind of fatherly notion of interfering, and seeing what's wrong.”
She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon doubtful inspiration—“By the way, speaking of fathers, I didn't know at Hadlow that you were the daughter of one of my Directors”—this smile froze upon the instant.
“The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel, don't you think?” she remarked, “than it is from here.”
Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. “I have taken a great interest in General Kervick,” he said, almost defiantly. “I am seeing to it that he has a comfortable income—an income suitable to a gentleman of his position—for the rest of his life.”
“He will be very glad of it,” she remarked.
“But I hoped that you would be glad of it too,” he told her, bluntly. A curious sense of reliance upon his superiority in years had come to him. If he could make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed likely that she would defer to it. “I'm talking to you as I would to my niece, you know,” he added, plausibly.
She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face, as if the point of view took her by surprise. “I don't understand,” she said. “You are providing an income for my father, because you wish to speak to me like an uncle. Is that it?”