“I never gave you leave to ask any one. How dare you invite people to my house without my permission?”
“I am lonely sometimes, father.”
I said the words in a sad voice; I could not help it; there was a lump in my throat. Father gazed at me, and all of a sudden his manner altered. He seated himself in a chair, and motioned to me to take another. He pulled the little tray with the nice tea towards him, poured out a cup, and drank it. Then he looked at the poached egg, put on his glasses, and gazed at it more fixedly.
“That’s a queer sort of thing,” he said; and then he ate it with considerable relish. “It’s very good,” he said when he had finished it. “Who did it?”
“Mr Von Marlo.”
“Rachel, you must be mad!”
“No, father; he isn’t an English boy, you know. He helped me; he is a very nice boy.”
My father sank back in his chair, and suddenly, to my amazement and relief, he burst into a roar of laughter.
“Well, well!” he said, “I admit that I was in a temper; and I was rude to the lad, too. If you ever have headaches like mine you will get into passions too, Rachel. Pray that you may never have them; my misery is something too awful; and when I saw that lad, with his great dark head, and that hair of his coming straight down to his eyebrows, marching up the stairs with you, I really thought a burglar had got into the house. But, after all, it was only the Dutch lad, and he is clever enough, and doesn’t know our English customs. And to think that he poached an egg!”
“And he made the toast, father.”