“No more do I; but I know he is perfect. He is said to be the image of Cracknel, only better. I tremble when I think that my possession of him hangs by a thread. He might be stolen at any moment.”
“You must be careful.”
“Yes, I cannot be too careful. Here comes Uncle George,” said Pamela, rising and running to meet Mr. Greswold. “O, Uncle George, how altered you are!”
She was always saying the wrong thing, after the manner of impulsive girls; and she was quickwitted enough to discover her mistake the instant after.
Happily the dogs furnished a ready diversion. She introduced Box, and expatiated upon his grand qualities. She admired and made friends with Kassandra, and then settled down almost as lightly as a butterfly, in spite of her plumpness, on a Japanese stool, to take her teacup from Mildred’s hands.
She was perfectly at her ease by this time, and told her uncle and aunt all about her sister Rosalind, and Rosalind’s husband, Sir Henry Mountford, whom she summed up lightly as a nice old thing, and no end of fun. It was easy to divine from her discourse that Rainham Hall was not an especially intellectual atmosphere, not a school of advanced thought, or of any other kind of thought. Pamela’s talk was of tennis, yachting, fishing, and shooting, and of the people who shared in those sports. She seemed to belong to a world in which nobody ever sat down except to eat, or stayed indoors except under stress of weather.
“I hear you have all manner of clever people in your neighbourhood,” she said by and by, having told all she had to tell about Rainham.
“Have we?” asked Greswold, smiling at her intensity.
“Yes, at Riverdale. They do say the author of Nepenthe is staying there, and that he is not a Roman Cardinal or an English statesman, but almost a young man—an Italian by birth—and very handsome. I would give worlds to see him.”
“It is not unlikely you may be gratified without giving anything,” answered her uncle. “Mr. Castellani was here yesterday afternoon, and threatened to repeat his visit.”