“So they have come back!” she says, her frank ringing voice sympathetically lowered and chastened. “Thank God that the Boers have not got them!”
“Yes; they arrived this morning!” replies he, still with his disengaged air.
She touches the little articles with delicate reverence one after another.
“Yes; here are all our presents—not one missing: the poor rector’s electric bâton”—with a little half-sobbing laugh—“that we all made such fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, he said, in one of his first letters, how useful it had turned out.”
The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being disturbed by irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper crackling slightly betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it.
The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own arm passes round his neck.
“You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious tenderness, as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress of a light kiss dropped upon his grey hair.
“Who told you that I had a letter?”
“Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.”
For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.”