“I want to speak to you, papa,” said Conny, still from without.
“Then come in,” he answered in a sort of resigned tone of voice, it appearing to him as one of the necessary ills of life to be interrupted, and he as a minister bound to put up with it; but this feeling of annoyance passed off in a moment, and he spoke gently and kindly enough when Conny came into the room.
“What is it, my dear?” he asked, smiling at his little housekeeper, as he called her, noticing her anxious air; “any trouble about to-morrow’s dinner, or something equally serious?”
“No, papa,” she replied, taking his quizzing in earnest. “The dinner is ordered, and nothing the matter with it that I know of. I want to speak to you about Teddy.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him, I hope?” said he, jumping up from his chair and wafting some of the sheets of his sermon from the table with his flying coat-tails in his excitement and haste. “Nothing wrong, I hope?”
Although a quiet easy-going man generally, the vicar was wrapt up in all his children, trying to be father and mother in one to them and making up as much as in him lay for the loss of that maternal love and guidance of which they were deprived at an age when they wanted it most; but of Teddy he was especially fond, his wife having died soon after giving him birth, and, truth to say, he spoiled him almost as much as that grandmother whose visitations were such a vexed question with Mary, causing her great additional trouble with her charge after the old lady left.
“Nothing wrong, papa dear, that I know of,” replied Conny in her formal deliberative sort of way; “but, I’m afraid he has gone off with those village boys again, for he’s nowhere about the place.”
“Dear me!” ejaculated the vicar, shoving up his spectacles over his forehead and poking his hair into an erect position like a cockatoo’s crest, as he always did when fidgety. “Can’t you send somebody after him?”
“Mary is busy, and Teddy doesn’t mind Joe, so there’s no use in sending him.”
“Dear me!” ejaculated her father again. “I’m afraid he’s getting very headstrong—Teddy, I mean, not poor Joe! I must really get him under better control; but, I—I don’t like to be harsh with him, Conny, you know, little woman,” added the vicar dropping his voice. “He’s a brave, truthful little fellow with all his flow of animal spirits, and his eyes remind me always of your poor mother when I speak sternly to him and he looks at me in that straightforward way of his.”