“I wonder if you also know why I’ve come to see you,” Mr. Vetch replied, presenting the top of his hat to her as if it were a looking-glass.
“No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m very glad. You might even have come before.” Then she added with her characteristic honesty: “Aren’t you aware of the great interest I’ve taken in your nephew?”
“In my nephew? Yes, my young friend Robinson. It’s for his sake I’ve ventured to intrude on you.”
She had been on the point of pushing a chair toward him, but she stopped in the act, staring with a smile. “Ah I hope you haven’t come to ask me to give him up!”
“On the contrary—on the contrary!” the old man returned, lifting his hand expressively and with his head on one side as if he were holding his fiddle.
“How do you mean, on the contrary?” she asked after he had seated himself and she had sunk into her former place. As if that might sound contradictious she went on: “Surely he hasn’t any fear that I shall cease to be a good friend to him?”
“I don’t know what he fears; I don’t know what he hopes,” said Mr. Vetch, looking at her now with a face in which she could see there was something more tonic than old-fashioned politeness. “It will be difficult to tell you, but at least I must try. Properly speaking, I suppose, it’s no business of mine, as I’m not a blood-relation to the boy; but I’ve known him since he was a mite—he’s not much more even now—and I can’t help saying that I thank you for your great kindness to him.”
“All the same I don’t think you like it,” the Princess declared. “To me it oughtn’t to be difficult to say anything.”
“He has told me very little about you; he doesn’t know I’ve taken this step,” the fiddler said, turning his eyes about the room and letting them rest on Madame Grandoni.
“Why do you speak of it as a ‘step’? That’s what people say when they’ve to do something disagreeable.”