Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/134

120 spot, quite sincerely, that he would, for the first years at least, make it his own charge. "You're her very first friend," he smiled.

"Am I?" Jean thought it wonderful news. "Before she has even seen me!"

"Oh, those are the first. You're 'handed down,'" said Tony, humouring her.

She evidently deprecated, however, any abatement of her rarity. "Why, I haven't seen her mother, either."

"No, you haven't seen her mother. But you shall. And you have seen her father."

"Yes, I have seen her father." Looking at him as if to make sure of it, Jean gave this assertion the assent of a gaze so unrestricted that, feeling herself after an instant caught, as it were, in it, she turned abruptly away.

It came back to Tony at the same moment with a sort of coarseness that he was to have sent her home; yet now, somehow, as if half through the familiarity it had taken but these minutes to establish, and half through a perception of her extreme juvenility, his reluctance to tell her so had dropped. "Do you know I'm under a sort of