Marcus smiled—“Oh, I didn’t mean that.”
That evening Mrs. Sloane wrote a letter and it ran as follows:
Dearest Elsie,—I have met the ogre. He’s really rather an ingratiating ogre and the most attentive of uncles. He is delightful with Shan’t. He is taken for a widower with his little girl. One dark-eyed siren has already tried to enchant him. I have interfered. The girl is much too good for him, and in other ways unsuitable. He couldn’t make her happy and she certainly would make him very unhappy. He would be in no danger at all if he were not bored and the mother managing. I don’t see, Elsie, why you should dislike him. He doesn’t know that I know you. Amusing, isn’t it? Shan’t and I are in the secret. She plays up splendidly—makes conversation and asks me how many children I have. She seems very happy and quite at home. She is too heavily hatted and stoutly shod, but I have interfered there, too. To me the uncle seems wasted. He should marry. I should make friends, if I were you.
To which Elsie wrote back that she was perfectly friendly towards Mr. Maitland. It was he who was impossible. She certainly couldn’t make advances. He had been very rude and very selfish about Diana. Diana, dear child, was very loyal to him and never said anything against him. Shan’t, of course, childlike, would be fond of any one who indulged her.
The elderly woman lay back in her chair and laughed when she read Elsie’s letter. Elsie was perfectly friendly towards the poor uncle. What would she be if she were unfriendly?
X
It takes an engineer to dam a river: a mere man
may stem the tide of a child’s crying, and if he can’t
there is always the woman waiting; it’s her job.
“Horrible!” thought Marcus as he made his way towards the house where lodged the girl and her mother, and he supposed her brothers and sisters. Supper? And shrimps for supper? The shrimps he had been asked to shrimp for? Why had Shan’t got him into this difficulty?