“What I meant to say was that Mrs. Tancred intended to look old, that it was a parti-pris in her case. I thought it must be so by the way she scratches her hair off her forehead.”
But here, chink or no chink, he broke in. “Stop!” he said, authoritatively, “I must beg of you to change the subject.”
Through the damp mistiness she looked up at him, snubbed and frightened, her pomegranate-flower lips apart, and with the stream of explanatory eloquence that had been issuing from them frozen at its source.
“I see that I am making bad worse,” she said presently, her glibness fled, and in a very crestfallen little pipe.
He could not command himself to speak again yet; still sorely angry and chafed, yet with a half-relenting feeling that he had been too harsh to this wicked little waif that had been tossed on his shore.
“I am a very great trial to you both,” presently came sighingly in his direction—sighingly, and he half-suspected showerily too; “but it is far worse for Mrs. Tancred than for you.”
“Worse for Mrs. Tancred than for me!” repeated he, echoing her words in a tone of alarm.
Was she going to be guilty of some new monstrosity against good taste? Was she going to force him to a fresh rebuke? This latter was perhaps the most urgent form that his fear took. But her next words reassured him.
“Yes, because she has to see so much more of me than you have. You are away all day, and need never cast a thought towards me between sunrise and sunset, but I am always before her eyes, shocking her every time that I open my mouth by my gross ignorance, or by saying something impossible without knowing it; and now that she has undertaken my education——”
She paused dramatically. A wholesome and welcome inclination to laugh came over him, but he checked it; he must not allow himself to decline into triviality, or she might at once resume her terrible confidentialness.