“—And to tell of fights in which their fathers were engaged——”
“Col. Coke is not so old as that, Mr. Butterfield. He can’t be much older than you,” she interrupted.
“He is young enough to be Emily’s father,” I admitted, “and perhaps a little too juvenile to be her grandfather. Coke is fifty.”
“He doesn’t look it, Mr. Butterfield.”
“He looks it, Mrs. Vicars, and you know it. Let us talk about something else. How is Master—Percival, is his name to be?”
The young gentleman in question had known the light of day for exactly three weeks, and was the commencement of Cicely Vicars’s family. I had been presented to him in his cot some days before, but beyond mutual celibacy, there was little as yet in common between us, and the conversation had flagged.
“Yes,” Mrs. Vicars responded, “he’s to be called Percival; and oh, Mr. Butterfield, he’s to be christened in a week, and I wondered——”
She hesitated.
“I already stand sponsor to an embarrassing extent, Mrs. Vicars,” I replied. “I never ascertained precisely to what the position pledged me, but I have an uncomfortable sense of responsibility to which I do not feel inclined to add.”
“But, Mr. Butterfield, those were—other people’s children—not mine.”