Rollo, it was plain, understood himself, and was in no confusion on the subject. Mr. Falkirk, either in uncertainty or in disgust, declined to pursue it. He finished his tea, and then, perhaps, feeling that he had no right to keep watch over his brother guardian, much to Wych Hazel's discomfiture, he took up his book and marched away.
Rollo left the table and came round then to a seat by her side.
'What have you been doing this winter?' he asked, putting the question with his eyes as well as with his words.
'Making old stock pay,'—said the girl, looking down at her folded hands; she was not of the calm sisterhood who hide themselves in crochet.
'Perhaps you will be so good as to enlarge upon that.'
Hazel sent back the first answer that came to her tongue, and the next: it was no part of her plan to have herself in the foreground.
'This is a fair average specimen of our tea-drinkings,' she said. 'And the mornings are hardly more eventful. Just lately, Mr. Falkirk has been a good deal disturbed about you. Or else he was easy about you, and disturbed about your doings,—he has such a confused way of putting things. But we heard you had copied my "hurricane track," ' said Miss Wych, folding her hands in a new position.
'And were you disturbed about my doings?'
'I? O no. I am never disturbed with what you do to anybody but me.'
Rollo did not choose to pursue that subject. He plunged into another.