Though Dr. Charles was not in his own house he gave orders. He took Mr. James's place at the foot of the table. He made her sit at his left hand and Mamma at his right; and he slanted Mamma's chair and fixed a basket screen on its back so that she was shielded both from the fire and from the presence of the old man.
Dr. Charles talked.
"Where did you get that thin face, Miss Mary? Not in Rathdale, I'll be bound."
He looked at you with small grey eyes blinking under weak lids and bared the shark's tooth, smiling. A kind, hungry shark.
"They must have starved you at your school. No? Then they made you study too hard. Kate—what d'you think Bill Acroyd's done now? Turned this year's heifers out along of last year's with the ringworm. And asks me how I think they get it. This child doesn't eat enough to keep a mouse, Mrs. Olivier."
He would leave off talking now and then to eat, and in the silence remarkable noises would come from the armchair. When that happened Miss Kendal would look under the table and pretend that Minnie and Johnnie were fighting. "Oh, those bad pussies," she would say.
When her face kept quiet it looked dead beside the ruddy faces of the three old men; dead and very quietly, very softly decomposing into bleached purple and sallow white. Then her gaiety would come popping up again and jerk it back into life.
Mr. James sat at her corner, beside Mary. He didn't talk, but his Wellington mouth moved perpetually in and out, and his small reddish eyes twinkled, twinkled, with a shrewd, secret mirth. You thought every minute he would burst out laughing, and you wondered what you were doing to amuse him so.
Every now and then Miss Kendal would tell you something about him.
"What do you think Mr. James did to-day? He walked all the way to Garth and back again. Over nine miles!"