“You should not flatten your face against the window-pane. You will spoil the shape of your nose, and you have made it look so red,” he observed, gravely. “Would you care to live, Alys, do you think, if you had a red nose?”
Alys gently stroked the ill-treated member as she answered, thoughtfully:
“I hardly think I should. Laurence, do you know there have been times when I have been afraid they might run in the family.”
“What?” asked Laurence, philosophically.
“Red noses,” answered Alys, calmly. “Aunt Winstanley has one, you know. She says its neuralgia, but I feel sure it is indigestion.”
Laurence looked up at her with a smile, which broke into a laugh as he observed the preternatural gravity of her expression.
“Come and sit down and have some breakfast, you absurd child,” he said. He was already seated at the table.
Alys walked slowly across the room, and took her place opposite him. She looked blooming enough notwithstanding all the trials she had had to endure. As the Western girls had pronounced her, such she was, very, very pretty—as pretty a girl as one could wish to see. Her soft dark hair grew low, but not too low, on the white, well-shaped forehead; her features were all good, and gave promise of maturing into even greater beauty than that of eighteen; her blue eyes could look up tenderly as well as brightly from under their long black eyelashes, for their colour was not of the cold steel-like shade that is often the peculiarity of blue eyes in such juxtaposition. But the tenderness was more a matter of the future than the present, for hitherto there had been little in her life to call forth the deeper tones of her character; she was happy, trustful and winning, full of life and vigour; incapable of a mean thought or action herself, incapable of suspecting such in others.
Mr Cheviott looked at her critically as she sat opposite him.
“Alys,” he said at last, “I am afraid I have not brought you up well.”