And escaping from Gerty’s hand, Boy literally danced into the room.
CHAPTER II
Making straight for Miss Letitia, the jumping bundle of dimples, gold curls, short knickers and waggling pinafore, came with a wild bound into that lady’s arms.
“Oo-ee!” he once more exclaimed—“Vi’lets!”
And, discovering a bunch of those sweet blossoms half-hidden in the folds of Miss Leslie’s soft lace necktie, he burrowed his little nose into them with delighted eagerness,—then looking up again, and smiling angelically, he repeated in a dulcet murmur, “’Es! Vi’lets! Oo’ is vezy sweet, zoo Kiss-Letty!”
Miss Letitia pressed him to her breast, patted him, smoothed his tousled locks, and took off his loosely-hanging pinafore, thereby disclosing his whole chubby form, clad in what city tailors euphoniously term a ‘small gent’s Jack Tar.’
“Well, Boy!” she said, her gentle voice trembling with quite a delicious cooing sweetness—“how are you to-day?”
“Me vezy well,” answered Boy placidly, twining round his dumpy fingers a long delicately-linked gold chain which ‘Kiss-Letty’ always wore—“Vezy well ’sank ’oo!” (this with a big sigh). “Me awfoo’ bozzered” (bothered) “’bout Dads! Poo Sing! Vezy—vezy ill!”
And Boy conveyed such a heartrending expression of deep distress into his beautiful blue eyes, that Miss Letitia was quite touched, and was almost persuaded into a sense of pity for the degraded creature who was “putting a thief into his mouth to steal away his brains,” in the opposite room.
“You see, Letitia,” murmured Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir with a fat complacent smile—“You see just how Boy takes it? He and his father are the most perfect friends in the world!”