She got up and went out into the other rooms in search of
something to amuse her. Little Tom had just come in, but she did not go
to the nursery. She took care not to expose herself to that. She was
willing to allow that she did not understand babies; and then to see
such a pale little thing the heir of the Randolphs worried her. He ought
to have been a little Hercules; it wounded her that he was so puny and
pale. She went through the great drawing-room, and looked at all the
additions to the furniture and decorations that Tom and Lucy had made.
They had kept a number of the old things; but naturally they had added a
good deal of _bric-a-brac_, of old things that here were new. Then Lady
Randolph turned into the library. She had gone up to one of the
bookcases, and was leisurely contemplating the books, with a keen eye,
too, to the additions which had been made, when she heard a sound near
her, the unmistakable sound of turning over the leaves of a book. Lady
Randolph turned round with a start, and there was Jock, sunk into the
depths of a large chair with a tall folio supported on the arms of it.
She had not seen him when she came in, and, indeed, many people might
have come and gone without perceiving him, buried in his corner. Lady
Randolph was thankful for anybody to talk to, even a boy.
"Is it you?" she said. "I might have known it could be nobody but you.
Do you never do anything but read?"
"Sometimes," said Jock, who had done nothing but watch her since she
came into the room. She gave him a sort of half smile.
"It is more reasonable now than when you were a child," she said; "for I
hear you are doing extremely well at school, and gaining golden
opinions. That is quite as it should be. It is the only way you can
repay Lucy for all she has done for you."
"I don't think," said Jock, looking at her over his book, "that Lucy
wants to be repaid."
"Probably not," said Lady Randolph. Then she made a pause, and looked
from him to the book he held, and then to him again. "Perhaps you don't
think," she said, "there is anything to be repaid."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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