'You had better let Joe carry some of the things, Miss Audrey,' suggested Cooper, as she packed a large basket; 'he is round about somewhere.' And Audrey assented to this.
Geraldine was just beginning her Blake story, and Mrs. Ross was listening to her with a troubled face, as Audrey, armed with the teapot, and followed by Joe with the basket, turned in again at the green gate of the Gray Cottage.
CHAPTER III
THE BLAKE FAMILY AT HOME
'Her manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burnt within her.'—De Quincey.
There was certainly a tinge of Bohemianism in Audrey's nature. She delighted in any short-cut that took her out of the beaten track. A sudden and unexpected pleasure was far more welcome to her than any festivity to which she was bidden beforehand.
'I am very unlike Gage,' she said once to her usual confidant, Captain Burnett. 'No one would take us for sisters; even in our cradles we were dissimilar. Gage was a pattern baby, never cried for anything, and delighted everyone with her pretty ways; and I was always grabbing at father's spectacles with my podgy little fingers, and screaming for the carving-knife or any such incongruous thing. Do you know my first babyish name for father?'
'I believe it was Daddy Glass-Eyes, was it not?' was the ready response, for somehow this young man had a strangely retentive memory, and seldom forgot anything that interested him.