“I am thirteen, Bindo is ten, Nonno is—is—is, oh, as old as the world.”
“Is he your grandfather?”
“That is what you say in English. We say Nonno.”
“Cannot he speak English?”
“No: he has lost his teeth, and it is so hard, is your English.”
“You are an impudent girl.”
Gemma smiled her beautiful shining smile, as if he had paid her an admirable compliment.
She knew the rider by sight very well, though he did not know her. His housekeeper had whipped Bindo for getting into her poultry-house and putting two eggs in his pocket, and his gardener one day had turned them both out of his orchards as trespassers, so that he and his residence of Carey’s Honor were already scored with black in the tablets of the children’s memories.
That he was a handsome young man, with a grave and pensive face and a very sweet smile, when he did smile, which was rarely, did not affect Gemma’s dislike to him: she was too young to be impressed by good looks. Philip Carey was not touched by the beauty of her either: he scarcely saw that she was pretty, he was so angry with her for what seemed to him her saucy answers.
“Why are you not dressed like a Christian?” he said, somewhat irrelevantly.