“There are half-a-dozen photographs of him, and the contents of several jewelers’ shops, I should fancy, just behind you,” observed Anastasia. “Have you come to retrieve them? I told him that unless his people were whole-sale jewelers he had better try a less expensive amusement.”
“His family is one of the oldest in England,” said Miss Lestrange impressively.
“Well, he’s young enough,” observed the imperturbable beauty. She had a slight American intonation which Miss Lestrange found strangely aggravating; it annoyed her almost beyond the power of speech.
“I have always taken the greatest interest in my nephew’s concerns,” she continued. “I have brought him up from his babyhood. I stand to him in the place of his parents.”
“And yet I had a very sensible letter from his father the other day,” interrupted Anastasia, and she laughed a low velvety laugh of pure pleasure (which Miss Lestrange promptly mistook for vulgar impertinence). “I think it is the most sensible letter I ever had, and I answered it. I guess he hasn’t sent you here, has he?”
“My brother married regrettably a second time,” said Miss Lestrange coldly, “a woman of no family connections, singularly unsuited to bring up a delicate and sensitive child; even her husband has never pressed the point.”
“You don’t say,” observed Anastasia, narrowly regarding her exquisite fingers. “Poor disconnected lady, I feel quite sorry for her!”
“On the contrary,” replied Miss Lestrange, “she has, I think, been very fortunate; a marriage of that kind for a girl in Edith Walton’s position, and at her age--she was thirty at the time--does not happen every day over here.”
Anastasia suddenly woke up for the first time; she opened her great eyes wide and looked at Miss Lestrange. It was a look so vital, so amazingly keen, staring out of the soft, mysterious, velvety dullness, that Miss Lestrange jumped.
Then Anastasia sank back into her usual attitude of inspired indolence.