“He plays divinely. His touch transformed my piano.”
“He looks the kind of man who would play the piano,” said Greswold, with ineffable contempt, looking down at his own sunburnt hands, hardened by exposure to all weathers, broadened by handling gun and punt-pole, and by half-a-dozen other forms of out-door exercise. “However, I have no objection to him, if he serve to amuse you and Pamela.”
He spoke with a kind of weary indifference, as of a man who cared for very little in life; and then he rose slowly, took up his stick, and strolled off to the shrubbery.
Pamela appeared on the following afternoon with boxes, bags, music-books, raquets, and parasols, in a proportion which gave promise of a long visit. She had asked as a tremendous favour to be allowed to bring Box—otherwise Fitz-Box—her fox-terrier, son of Sir Henry Mountford’s Box, great-grandson of Brockenhurst Joe, through that distinguished animal’s daughter Lyndhurst Jessie, and on the paternal side a lineal descendant of Mr. Murchison’s Cracknel.
“I hope you won’t mind very much,” she wrote; “but it would be death to him if I were to leave him behind. To begin with, his brother Fitz-Cox, who has a villanous temper, would inevitably kill him; and besides that, he would pine to death at not sleeping in my room at night, which he has done ever since he was a puppy. If you will let me bring him, I will answer for his good manners, and that he shall not be a trouble to any one.”
The descendant of Brockenhurst Joe rushed out into the garden, and made a lightning circuit of lawn and shrubberies, while his young mistress was kissing her Aunt Mildred, as she called her uncle’s wife in the fulness of her affection.
“It is so very good of you to have me, and I am so delighted to come!” she said.
Mildred would have much preferred that she were anywhere else, yet could not help feeling kindly to her. She was a frank, bright-looking girl, with brown eyes, and almost flaxen hair; a piquant contrast, for the hair was genuine, and carried out in the eyebrows, which were only just a shade darker. Her complexion was fair to transparency, and she had just enough soft rosy bloom to light up the delicate skin. Her nose was slightly retroussé, her mouth was a little wider than she herself approved, and her teeth were perfection. She had a charming figure of the plump order, but its plumpness was a distress to her.
“Don’t you think I get horribly stout?” she asked Mildred, when she was sitting at tea in the garden presently.