“People have said that before. Oh! never mind my hair!” Mrs. Mussard was not displeased, nevertheless. “Tell me how you progress at School. You know your mother is my dearest friend. I should so much like you to remember that and confide in me, almost as you confide in her!”
A solemn, innocent expression came over Valcourt’s face.
“All right,” he said, after a pause, during which he seemed to be listening to choirs of angels chanting to the accompaniment of celestial harps. “I’ll tell you things just exactly as I tell ’em to mother!”
“You dear!” exclaimed the impulsive young widow, and kissed him. The smooth elastic skin, brownish-pink as a new-laid egg, and dotted with sunny little freckles, grew pinker under the velvet violence of the lady’s lips. Valcourt turned the other cheek, with his cherub’s smile, and less warmly, because more consciously, his mother’s dearest friend saluted that also.
“Now,” he said, in his boyish voice, “what did you want me to tell you about School? I’m not a sap at books, and I don’t spend all my time in getting up my muscles. I’m just an ordinary kind of fellow.... I say, how pretty your nails are!”
He took up one of Mrs. Mussard’s exquisitely manicured hands, and, holding it to the tempered sunlight that stole through the lace blinds, noted with appreciative, if infantile, interest the pearly hues and rosy inward radiances, the nicks and dimples of the wrist and the delicate articulations of the fingers. Then, with a droll, half-mischievous twinkle of the tourmaline eye that was next the fair widow, he bent his sleek, fair head and rubbed his cheek against the pretty hand caressingly.
“Silly boy!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.
“I believe I am an awful ass sometimes,” agreed Valcourt composedly.
“Who says so?”
“My tutor and heaps of other fellows, and the Head—not that he says so, but he looks as if he thought it!” said Valcourt.