And so Sir Roger keeps away. Whether his self-denial costs him much, I cannot say. It never occurs to me at the time that it does. He may think me a very nice little girl, and that I shall be a great comfort to him, but he cannot care much about having any very long conversations with me--he that has seen so many lands, and known so many great and clever people, and read so many books. He has always been _most_ undemonstrative to me. At _his_ age, no doubt, he does not care much for the foolish endearments of lovers; so, with an easy conscience, I devote myself, for my short space, to the boys, to Barbara, to Vick, and the jackdaw. Once, indeed--just once--I have a little talk with him, and afterward I almost wish that I had not had it. We are sitting under a horse-chestnut-tree in the garden--a tree that, under the handling of the warm air, is breaking into a thousand tender faces. We did not begin by being _tête-à-tête_; indeed, several lately-occupied chairs intervene between us, but first one and then another has slipped away, and we are alone. "Nancy!" says Sir Roger, his eyes following the Brat, who is lightly tripping up the stone steps, looking very small and agile in his white-flannel cricketing things, "what is that boy's real name? Why do you call him 'the Brat'?" "Because he _is_ such a _Brat_," reply I, fondly, picking up from the grass a green chestnut-bud that the squirrels or the rooks have untimely nipped. "Did you ever see any thing so little, so white and pert? He has sadly mistaken his vocation in life: he ought to have been a street Arab." "One gets rather sick of one's surname," says my companion. "Except your father, hardly any one calls me Roger now! I should be glad to answer to it again." He turns and looks at me with a kind of appeal as he says this. If he were not forty-seven and a man, I should say that he was coloring a little. After all, blushing is confined to no age. I have seen a veteran of sixty-five redden violently. "Do you mean to say," cry I, looking rather aghast, and speaking, as usual, without thinking, "that you mean _me_ to call you _Roger_! indeed, I could not think of such a thing! it would sound so--so _disrespectful_! I should as soon think of calling my father _James_." "Should you?" he answers, turning away his face toward the garden-beds, where the blue forget-me-not is unrolling her sky-colored sheet, and the double daisies are stiffly parading their tight pink buttons. "Then call me what you like!" I am not learned in the variations of his voice, as I am in those of father and Algy, in either of which I can at once detect each fine inflection of anger, contest, or pain; but, comparatively unversed as I am in it, there sounds to me a slight, carefully smothered, yet still perceptible, intonation of disappointment--mortification. I wish that the air would give me back my words; but that it never yet was known to do.