'I see I have fallen in good hands,' he replied, brightening at this in
a boyish sort of way. 'Where is the schoolroom? I did not know there was
such an apartment, but of course Mrs. Garston told me that her youngest
daughter had not finished her studies. I think I saw her once: she was
very tall, and had dark hair.'
'Oh yes; that was Jill--I mean Jocelyn, but we always call her Jill. Will
you come this way, please? Fraeulein is out, and we were having a good
time by ourselves.'
'And I have come to spoil it,' he answered regretfully, as I opened the
door.
I shall never forget Jill's face when she saw us on the threshold. She
quite forgot to shake hands with Mr. Tudor in her dismay, but stood
hunching her shoulders, with Sooty still clasped in her arms and her
great eyes staring at him, till he said a pleasant word to her, and then
she flushed up, and subsided into her chair. I stole an anxious glance at
the cake; to my great relief, Jill had been quietly proceeding with her
meal in my absence, for I knew that in her chagrin she would refuse to
touch another morsel. I wondered a little what Mr. Tudor would think of
her ungracious reception of him; but he showed his good-breeding by
taking no notice of it and confining his remarks to me.
Jill's ill-humour thawed by and by when she saw how he entered into the
spirit of the fun. He vaunted his own skill with the toasting-fork, and,
in spite of fatigue, insisted on superintending another batch of the
buttered toast; he was very particular about the clearness of the fire,
and delivered quite an harangue on the subject. Jill's sulky countenance
relaxed by and by; she opened her lips to contradict him, and was met so
skilfully that she appealed to me for assistance.
By the time tea was over, we were as friendly with Mr. Tudor as though we
had known him all our lives, and Jill was laughing heartily over his racy
descriptions of schoolroom feasts and other escapades of his youth. He
looked absurdly young, in spite of his clerical dress; he had a bright
face and a peculiarly frank manner that made me trust him at once; he did
not look particularly clever, and Jill had the best of him in argument,
but one felt instinctively that he was a man who would never do a mean or
an unkind action, that he would tell the truth to his own detriment with
a simple honesty that made up for lack of talent.
I could see that Jill's bigness and cleverness surprised him. He
evidently found her amusing, for he tried to draw her out; perhaps he
liked to see how her great eyes opened and then grew bright, as she
tossed back her black locks or shook them impatiently. When Jill was
happy and at ease her face would grow illuminated; her varying
expression, her animation, her quaint picturesque talk, made her
thoroughly interesting. I was never dull in Jill's company; she had
always something fresh to say; she had a fund of originality, and drew
her words newly coined from her own mint.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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