Theodore felt glad he was not a Grenville if that was the type. He murmured some vague civility about the children, while he shook hands with Lady Jane, who had come forward shyly to welcome him, almost obliterated by her more loquacious daughter.
“Don’t you think Johnnie the very image of his poor dear uncle?” asked Mrs. Grenville urgently, a question which always agonized Lady Jane, who could not see the faintest likeness between her snub-nosed and bilious-looking grandchild and her handsome son.
Theodore was too nervous to be conscious of his own untruthfulness in replying in the affirmative. He was anxious to have done with the children, and to hear about his cousin.
“I hope Juanita is not ill?” he said.
“Oh, no, she is pretty well,” replied Lady Jane, “but we keep her as quiet as we can, and of course the children are rather trying for her——”
“Nobody can say that they are noisy children,” interjected the happy mother.
“So she seldom leaves her own rooms till the evening,” continued Lady Jane. “You would like to see her at once, I dare say, Mr. Dalbrook? And I know she will be pleased to see you.”
She rang, and told the footman to inquire if Lady Carmichael was ready to see Mr. Dalbrook, and Theodore had to occupy the interval until the footman’s return with polite attentions to the four children. He asked Lucy whence she had obtained those delightful bricks, thereby eliciting the information that the bricks were not Lucy’s, but Godolphin’s, only he “let her play with them,” as he observed magnanimously. He was gratified with the further information that the tower now in process of elevation was not a church, but the Tower of Babel; and he was then treated to the history of that remarkable building as related in Holy Writ.
“You didn’t know that, did you?” remarked Godolphin, boastfully, when he had finished his narration in a harsh bawl, being one of those coarse brats whom their parents boast of as after the pattern of the infant Hercules.
The footman returned before Godolphin had wrung a confession of ignorance from the nervous visitor, and Theodore darted up to follow him out of the room.