In three minutes Montagu said, "Well?"
Mr. Wycherly closed the book. "I cannot," he said, "be expected to express an opinion after so cursory a glance at the contents. Montagu, go and ask Mrs. Dew for a glass of milk; this child looks faint; bring some biscuits, too."
Montagu sped away, and he turned to Jane-Anne.
"You mustn't mind him," he said kindly. "Clever Winchester boys are always intolerant—while they are boys. Montagu reads a great deal more than he can digest, and people with indigestion are proverbially cantankerous."
Jane-Anne didn't understand what he meant in the very least, but she felt immediately and immensely comforted. So much so, that she was impelled to speak to Mr. Wycherly of her thoughts when she first came out.
"Please, sir," she said, calmly dismissing the merits or demerits of "Home Influence" that seemed so vital a moment ago. "Do you know a piece of poetry about mountains?"
"A great deal of poetry has been written about mountains," Mr. Wycherly replied cautiously.
"It's a piece of poetry I want to find," said Jane-Anne, "that I heard many times long ago, and I can't remember anything about it except that there was mountains. I thought perhaps you'd know it."
Here Montagu appeared with a glass of milk and some biscuits. The milk had slopped over on to the biscuits "in some unaccountable way," he explained; but their sopped condition did not spoil them for Jane-Anne, who munched quite happily and smiled her broad ecstatic smile at him to show that she had forgiven his cruel remarks about "Home Influence."
Presently the doctor came to see her, and Mrs. Dew fetched her in to be sounded.