“We’d soon have managed that,” he said, laughing too with relief, “sunk a well or turned the whole place upside down; that would have presented no difficulty. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me that you take it so easily, Evelyn. It was—it was—Marion who put it into my head. She said, ‘There will be nobody that mamma will like to associate with here.’ That was all her own doing—not suggested in any way by me: for I did not know whether you would like it, if a little girl you never saw before called you, right out—”
“Like it!” said Evelyn—Perhaps, to tell the truth, she had winced a little. “Of course I should like it. It shows an inclination to adopt me, which is the very best thing I could have hoped for. Tell me about her, James. The house is very interesting, but the children are more interesting than the house.”
“You take a load off my mind when you say so. I would give a thousand pounds that the first was over—that you had met them and made acquaintance with them. She’s eighteen, and he’s twenty. The boy is rather a cub—and the girl—”
“My dear James! it’s very likely they are not made up exactly to your taste: how could they be? They are very young, and it will be quite exciting to put them a little into shape—into our shape. Society, indeed!—Society, whatever it was, would not be nearly so interesting as that. Tell me everything about them, James.”
Encouraged by this, Mr. Rowland began to tell her his experiences with the children; but by some means it came about that, he could not tell how, their faults got slurred over, and their good qualities magnified in his hand. How did it happen? He could not tell. He had Marion’s impertinent little minois before him every word he said, yet he managed to give an inoffensive saucy look to Marion—a saucy look which fathers do not dislike, though mothers may object to it. And then the boy—
“Archie disarms me,” he said, “because I can’t help seeing in him his mother’s eyes. I’m afraid he’s a dour fellow and sullen, and you can’t be expected to be mollified as I am. It takes away my anger when I look at him. And yet I had cause to be angry.”
“Tell me,” she said.
And then Mr. Rowland told the story, beginning at the apparition of the groom with his question about the dougs, and ending with Archie’s defence of his aunt, who had taken his money from him, against the father who had given it. As he told this, it seemed to himself less bad as an indictment against Archie than he had supposed. What was it, after all, that the boy had done? The enormity disappeared as it was put into words. And Evelyn sat smiling, from time to time shaking her head.
“It appears to me,” she said, “that if Archie was wrong, as no doubt he was, Archie’s father was also a little to blame.”
“Do you think so?” he said eagerly. He was glad to think that perhaps this might be so.