She had come close up to Mr. Wycherly and was pleading as though her very life depended on it.
Mr. Wycherly drew her between his knees, and there was a look of considerable amusement on his handsome old face as he asked: "If it is so ugly and so uncomfortable, why should you want to bestow it upon anybody else?"
"But it's quite good," Jane-Anne expostulated; "we couldn't throw it away. Some child might be glad of it. I'm not. Let's talk about what I shall have," she added coaxingly, and somehow she found herself sitting on Mr. Wycherly's knee.
It was years since she had sat on anybody's knee, and that she should do so again and in such circumstances seemed to her inconceivably delightful.
Jane-Anne expanded like a flower.
It did not seem such an extraordinary thing to Mr. Wycherly that a child should sit on his knee. He had served a long and somewhat severe apprenticeship to Montagu and Edmund, who both had generally elected to sit upon him at the same time. What most impressed him about Jane-Anne was that she was distressingly light.
They had a long and intimate confabulation on the subject of frocks, finally deciding that, with Mrs. Dew's permission, Mrs. Methuen should be taken into their counsels.
The clock struck nine.
Jane-Anne flung her arms round his neck and kissed him, and yet again he opened the door for her as she went out.
The following afternoon Mrs. Dew sent her out to do some messages, and while she was outside a shop—there were hats in that shop, and Jane-Anne flattened her nose against the window in her enthusiastic interest—two ladies came out to a carriage that was waiting at the kerb.