“Oh, you’ve come, have you?” he said, taking off his spectacles and turning himself in his heavy revolving chair toward the children. “And how are you, my dears? Did you sleep well after your long journey?”
It did not take long to install a child on each knee. Addison gazed at him in adoring silence, but Kit hastened to unbosom herself of her wrongs. “I’ve come to complain!” she began with dignity. “They’ve only laid lunch for you in the dining-room. Now I know you’d like our company. Mother said we were to keep you company—will you give orders about it?”
Gaffer seemed duly impressed, as he said: “I will give orders at once. Of course you are to have lunch with me while you are here. It’s a pity it’s so wet for your first day, but it’s nice to think that those dear people are going further and further away from the fogs and damp. It will do mother so much good to be in a warm climate, and you must try not to feel dull without them.”
“I wish they’d taken me!” said Kit. “I love hotels!” Gaffer looked at her and laughed: “What a traveled little person you are! I never slept in a hotel till I was seventeen.”
“Ah, but that’s long ago. People go about more now, and, you see, we have to go with the regiment.”
“To go with the regiment,” echoed Addison.
Kit conversed affably with her grandfather for some time; she told him who were her favorite officers, and which her favorite puddings. She carefully explained that, as she was four years older than Addison, she went to bed an hour later, and that she intended to spend that hour in her grandfather’s society. She expressed her approval of the study as a room, but thought it was a pity that, owing to the large number of books, there was no space for any pictures on the walls. Addison stared about him in solemn silence, till at last Gaffer suggested that, as he had got to write to mother, they had better go back to the nursery till lunchtime. Then they trotted across the room together, but when they reached the door and Kit had gone out, Addison raced back and stood by his grandfather’s chair, whispering breathlessly: “Will you let me see some of the books some day—wivout Kit?” There was a passionate eagerness in the question which startled Gaffer. He looked down at the imploring, upturned face.
And then “a strange thing happened.” It was no longer Addison, his namesake, that he saw; it was himself. Himself of sixty years ago. There he stood, the quaint, serious-eyed boy, whose portrait hung in his dead wife’s dressing-room. The boy who longed for books, and who had asked the same question of a scholar in an Oxford library, on a long-forgotten morning all those years ago. With a sudden rush of gratitude he remembered how the question had been answered, and though his smile was very pleasant, his voice was a trifle husky as he said:
“Assuredly!”
“Wivout Kit?” persistently questioned the little boy.