Suddenly they began talking quite naturally and gently with one another.
“Who would have thought,” said Lovel, “that you would be coming to the circus. Not that I should have come, nor you, I fancy, either, had we known what we were to see. Yet we might have thought. Wild beasts turned to buffoons. I would have liked to let a tiger out of its cage, loose among the crowd. Did you see their eyes? yes, even the little pig-eyes of the bears. I wouldn’t like to look into the eyes of the tigers in their cages, when they stare through the bars. Trundled about over England in those cages.... Why did you come? I came to please poor Olver.”
“And I because Mr. Calladine was dining at the Manor House, and I ... oh, there is nothing to do after dinner,” she finished lamely.
“What do you do as a rule?” he inquired, with a passing curiosity.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Sometimes he talks to my father, sometimes we walk in the garden, sometimes I sing.”
“You sing,” he repeated. “You sing.”
“Sometimes he and my father go over the things in my father’s cases, and they forget me, and I sit in a corner with some stitching.”
“Yes,” said Lovel, “and the windows are open down to the floor, and the moths and cockchafters fly in from the garden towards the lamps, and you let your stitching fall into your lap while you watch them.”
Clare was utterly startled.
“How do you know?” she murmured.