“In reality, perhaps; but five ten in appearance—taller than Rex, and that won’t do,” was Tom’s rejoinder, while Irene asked:
“Did he ever criticise my height?”
“Why, no; not exactly,” Tom replied, with a feeling that he was getting into hot water. “He has said something about your being rather tall, but with your hair as it is now, and that topknot half-way across the Atlantic, as it must be by this time, you are all right, and I never saw you look so well.”
Irene knew Tom meant all he said, and her face brightened a little, but there was still a shadow on it as she said:
“Do please be serious and sensible for once, and tell me if Mr. Travers saw the braid I lost?”
For a moment Tom hesitated; then he replied:
“Saw it? of course he did. How could he help it when he pulled it off your head and thought he had a part of your scalp with it? You never saw so distressed a fellow as he was holding it gingerly as if it were a live thing, and he was so relieved when I told him it had never grown on the top of your head, ‘the place where the wool ought to grow.’ You know that medley.”
“O Tom! why will you worry me so?” Irene asked, and Tom replied:
“I’m not worrying you. I’m only telling you how badly Rex felt when he thought he had torn off part of your head in trying to save you, and how relieved he was when I set him right. You see he lost his mother when he was a baby, and never had any sisters, or cousins, or aunts—was reared by an old mammy, who was once a slave in the family, and he knows nothing of girls’ little arts and make-ups, and supposed, of course, that every hair of that steeple was natural. I think he is glad it was not and that a part of it has gone to the mermaids. I am.”
Tom was sitting very close to Irene, with his hand on the arm of her chair, and was talking to her as he did not often talk. His compliments pleased her and she was thinking him not so bad a cousin, after all, when he startled her by saying: