The boy it was who brought them again face to face. Dolores had reëntered the living-room. John Cabot stopped beside the center table--stopped and looked across at her. Just what his look meant--superstition, disapproval, fear--she could not be sure. Her heart beat uncomfortably while she waited for him to speak. “I was told down-stairs that a new governess had come,” he said, after what seemed a long time. “I didn’t understand that it was you.” “And I didn’t understand that the position was offered by you,” she replied. “If you are displeased, Mr. Cabot, I will give up--Jack.” “But I won’t give _her_ up, John, even if she is a woman-governess. She knows games that I never heard about. If you’ll just get me an Airedale now----” The child’s demands broke the strain of the moment. John Cabot offered his hand. The faint smile of his reassurance disappeared from his lips when he read on the tiling the continuation of Jack’s story of the gold-fish. Dolores studied him. Although a shadow lowered over his eyes at this evidence of the evil temper of his son, he gave her an impression of great kindness and great suppression. He looked like what he really was--which, she had noticed, most men do not. “I am afraid, my boy, that I could not trust a live dog to you,” he said. He was restoring the last of the stranded aquatics to comfort within the bowl when a lilting laugh surprised the three. Mrs. Cabot, evidently recovered from her headache, was watching them. CHAPTER XII John Cabot seldom spoke with the new governess, as she took to absenting herself during the afternoon hour which he spent with his son. None the less she learned much about him and, through the opinion of others, came to hold him in high regard. Mrs. Morrison, daughter of the distinguished-looking old butler, Bradish, had been with the Cabot family practically her lifetime and proved an enthusiastic informant at the tea-time chats to which she frequently invited the girl. She took a personal pride in her employer and his career. Mr. Cabot, she boasted, was one of the few “real” New Yorkers. His family had lived in Manhattan since the sixteen-fifties. A red brick house in Whitehall Street, near the Battery, had been the birthplace of two generations of his grandfathers. There the Cabots had lived in the days when Castle Garden was the home of Grand Opera and Jennie Lind its Galli-Curci. The old house still stood, although its quondam drawing-room, where once the fair and gallant had stepped the minuet, now staged nothing more romantic than haggles over the price of shipping stores.