"Oh!" cried Little Miss Grouch. "That adorable kiddie! I nearly forgot him. Don't forget, please," she added to the Tyro, "you promised to look after them and see that they got on the right train."
"Steerage passengers come in later," said Lord Guenn. "Hullo! There's your pater, on the upper deck of the tender. Doesn't look particularly stern and unforgiving, does he? Perhaps you'll get off with your life, after all."
Little Miss Grouch turned rather white, and shot an appealing look at the Tyro, correctly interpreting which, he wandered away.
When he next saw her, she was in the arms of a square-faced grizzled man, and manifestly quite content to be there. The tender was swaying alongside in a strong tide-rip and the Tyro himself was making the passage between the two craft carefully but jerkily, in the wake of Alderson and Enderby. Once on the small boat he separated himself from his companions, found a secluded spot at the rail, well aft, and tactfully turned his back upon the Grouch group.
Evolutionists assert that we all possess some characteristic, however vague, of all the forms into which the life-stock has differentiated. Upon this theory the Tyro must have had in his make-up a disproportionate share of the common house-fly, which, we are taught, rejoices in eyes all around its head. For, though he sedulously averted his face from the pair in whom his interest centered, he was perfectly aware of what they were doing.
First Little Miss Grouch glanced at him and said something. Then her father glared at him and said something. Then she turned toward him again and made another remark. Then the disgruntled parent glowered more fiercely and said a worse thing than he had said before. Then both of them regarded him until his ears flushed and swelled to their farthest tips.
All of which was a triumph of the visual imagination. As a matter of fact they weren't talking about him at all. Little Miss Grouch was afraid to. And her stern parent didn't even know who he was. The subject of their conversation was, largely, the Battery Place house.
Still continuing to imagine a vain thing, the Tyro felt the gentlest little pressure on his arm.
"Such a deep-brown, brown study!" said Little Miss Grouch's gay little voice, at his elbow.
The Tyro turned with a sigh, quickly succeeded by a smile. It was very hard not to smile, just for pure joy of the eye, when Little Miss Grouch was in the foreground.