“He got red at first and didn’t answer and I got awfully frightened. Then he said in quite a natural voice, ‘If you will behave just as you like I will try not to put you off. It is very kind of you to trouble about me.’ Rather as if I were a dog that he had been asked to exercise. However it was a beginning, and now he starts off by himself. I think the great thing is that he doesn’t regard me as a girl.”
“What does he think you are, then?”
“I don’t know. A sort of inferior Tommy I should think; uneducated but harmless, and quite useless. I might be his batman, marooned with him in a desert full of baboons.”
“It sounds very unlikely,” said Teresa. “You have a very muddled head, Chips, and you read such a lot of scraps that I believe it makes you worse; but you explain yourself quite clearly. I shall be interested to-morrow when I see that stuffed back at the breakfast table. Father would be amused.”
“You are not to tell him,” said Evangeline quickly.
“I’m not going to. At least I might have if you hadn’t told me not to. Why don’t you want him to know that his man is nicer than we thought?”
“I don’t know, except that I discovered him and I don’t want to show him to people; he’s not nearly ready. And besides, he is like having a sitting-room of my own. I like a retreat that no one else knows the way to.”
“Is Hatton in the house by any chance?” Cyril asked one day when he came in to tea.
“I don’t know at all, dear,” said Susie. “I should think very likely; he generally is.”