"Ah," he said. "But I doubt, now," he continued, with a little deprecating wave of his tea-cup at me, "if Miss M. can remember me. When we first met we were precisely one week old, precisely one week old."
Why, like Dr Phelps, Mr Pellew referred to me as we I had not time to consider, for he was already confiding to Mrs Monnerie that he had never baptized an infant who more strenuously objected to Holy Water than had I. I looked at his long, fair eyelashes and the smile-line on his cheek as he bent with a sort of jocular urbanity over her chair, but could not recall his younger face, though during my christening I must, of course, have gazed at him even more absorbedly.
"'Remember' you—I'll be bound she did," cried Mrs Monnerie with enthusiasm, "or was it the bachelor thumb? The mercy is you didn't drop her into the font. Can you swim, my dear?"
"I couldn't at a week," I replied as archly as possible. "But I can swim; my father taught me."
"But how wonderful!" broke our listeners into chorus.
"There we are, then," asserted Mrs Monnerie; "sea-bathing! And are we a swimmer, Mr Pellew?"
Mr Pellew seemed not to have caught her question. He was assuring me that Miss Fenne had kept him well informed—well informed of all my doings. He trusted I was comfortable with the excellent Mrs Bowater, and hoped that some day I should be able to pay a visit to his rectory in Devonshire. "Mrs Pellew, he knew...." What he knew about Mrs Pellew, however, was never divulged, for Mrs Monnerie swallowed him up:—
"Devonshire, my dear Mr Pellew! no, indeed. Penthouse lanes, redhot fields, staring cows. Imagine it! She would be dried up like a leaf. What she wants is a mild but bracing sea-air. It shall be arranged. And who is this Mrs Bowater?"
At this precise moment, among the strange faces far above me, I descried that of Mr Crimble, modestly peering out of the background. He coughed, and in a voice I should scarcely have recognized as his, informed Mrs Monnerie that my landlady was "a most res—an admirable woman." He paused, coughed again, swept my soul with his glance—"I assure you, Mrs Monnerie, in view of—of all the circumstances, one couldn't be in better hands. Indeed the house is on the crest of the hill, well out of the town, yet not a quarter of an hour's walk from my mother's."
"Hah!" remarked Mrs Monnerie, with an inflection that I am sure need not have brought a warmth to my cheek, or a duskier pallor to Mr Crimble's.