He looked dubiously at his boots as he spoke, and began switching them lightly with his riding-whip.”
“Never mind,” said Miss Methvyn; “only please don’t send the dust on to me.” She spoke laughingly; but her tone sobered into gravity as she went on, “Black dresses catch dust so easily.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said. Then he looked up from his boots and fixed his pleasant, good-tempered blue eyes on his cousin. She was sitting at a little table near him,—writing, in point of fact making up accounts. She had stopped when Mr. Fawcett first came in, but had not altogether withdrawn her attention from the papers. before her; and now in the intervals of his remarks, she ran her eye up and down the neat little columns of figures, and jotted down the results of her calculations.
“What are you so busy about, Cicely?” said Mr. Fawcett after a little pause.
Miss Methvyn stopped to put down a figure before she spoke. “It’s Saturday,” she replied laconically, glancing up for a moment, and then putting down another.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” replied her cousin. “What about it?”
His tone was perfectly good-natured. Something in it struck Cicely’s sense of the ludicrous. She threw down her pen and began to laugh.
“You’re very long suffering, Trevor,” she said, “and I’m very rude. On Saturdays I have always to go over all the accounts; the bailiff’s, the gardener’s, and all—and make a sort of summary of them for papa. I generally do them upstairs in my own room, but Geneviève was working at something up there this morning, so I brought them down here.”
“It isn’t proper work for you. Your father should get a regular agent,” said Mr. Fawcett.
“No he shouldn’t,” said Cicely; but the tone and manner disarmed the abruptness of her speech. She glanced at her cousin with an expression of half-playful defiance. He smiled.