“Mrs Ingleton, I know, is very pleased.”
“Yes, but you men aren’t. There’ll be fearful rows, I know. I wish we’d stayed behind in India. It’s hateful to be stuck down where you aren’t wanted, for every one to vote you a nuisance!”
“I can hardly imagine any one voting you a nuisance,” said Mr Armstrong, half-frightened at his own temerity.
She glanced up with a little threatening of a blaze in her eyes. “Don’t!” said she. “That’s the sort of thing the silly young gentlemen say on board ship. I don’t like it.”
The poor tutor winced as much under this rebuff as if he had been just detected in a plot to run away with his fair companion; and having nothing to say in extenuation of his crime, he relapsed into silence.
Miss Oliphant, apparently unaware of the effect of her little protest, stroked her dog again and said—
“Are you an artist?”
“No; are you?”
“I want to be. I’d give anything to get out of going to Maxfield, and have a room here in town near the galleries. It will be awful waste of time in that dull place.”
“Perhaps your father—” began the tutor; but she took him up half angrily.