“Has he been cross?” said Sir Charles. He held the little creature in his arms lovingly, with a smile that irradiated his own heavy countenance like a gleam of sunshine.
“I hates her,” cried Job. “I kicked her. She dot nothing to do with me.”
“Job, Job,” said the father gently, “you shouldn’t be so cross and so hasty to a kind lady who only wanted to bring you to father. If you behave like that she will never be kind to you again.”
“I don’t tare. I hates ze lady,” Job said.
His father lifted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders apologetically to Katherine, and then laughed and carried his little son away. Decidedly, whatever Katherine was to make a success in, it was not in the rôle of maiden aunt.
Next day, to the distress and trouble of Katherine, early in the afternoon there came a visitor whose appearance made Stella turn towards her sister with an open-eyed look of malice and half ridicule. No; Lady Somers did not intend it so. It was a look of significance, “I told you so,” and call upon Katherine’s attention. The visitor was James Stanford, their fellow-passenger by the Aurungzebe. He explained very elaborately that Sir Charles had given him an invitation, and that, finding himself on business of his own in the Isle of Wight, he had taken advantage of it. He was not a man who could quickly make himself at his ease. He seemed oppressed with a consciousness that he ought not to be there, that he wanted some special permission, as if it had been with some special purpose that he had come.
“Oh, you need not apologise,” said Stella; “if you had not come then you might have apologised. We expect everybody to come to see us. Fancy, we’ve seen scarcely anyone for a week almost, except some old friends who have lectured us and told us what was our duty. Do you like to be told what is your duty, Mr. Stanford? I don’t; if I were ever so much inclined to do it before, I should set myself against it then. That is exactly how narrow country people do; they turn you against everything. They tell you this and that as if you did not know it before, and make you turn your back on the very thing you wanted to do.”
“I don’t think,” said Stanford, “that I could be turned like that from anything I wanted to do.”
“Perhaps you are strong-minded,” said Stella. “I am not, oh, not a bit. I am one of the old-fashioned silly women. I like to be left alone and to do my own way. Perhaps it’s a silly way, but it’s mine. And so you have had business on the island, Mr. Stanford? Have you seen that lady again—that lady with the black eyes and the yellow hair? She will not like it at all if she doesn’t see you. She was very attentive to you during the voyage. Now, you can’t deny that she was attentive. She was a great deal nicer to you than you deserved. And such a pretty woman! To be sure that was not the natural colour of her hair. She had done something to it; up at the roots you could see that it had once been quite dark. Well, why not, if she likes yellow hair better? It is going quite out of fashion, so there can be no bad object in it, don’t you know.”
Stella laughed largely, but her visitor did not respond. He looked more annoyed, Katherine thought, than he had any occasion to be, and her pride was roused, for it seemed to her that they both looked at herself as if the woman who had paid attention to Mr. Stanford could have anything to do with her. She changed the subject by asking him abruptly if he felt the rigour of the English climate after his long life in India.