Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/22

 her companion again with the steady orb of justice, 'And do he have his tea, that way, by himself, like a little gentleman?'

'Well, I try to give it to him tidy-like, at a suitable hour,' said Miss Pynsent, guiltily. 'And there might be some who would say that, for the matter of that, he is a little gentleman,' she added, with an effort at mitigation which, as she immediately became conscious, only involved her more deeply.

'There are people silly enough to say anything. If it's your parents that settle your station, the child hasn't much to be thankful for,' Mrs. Bowerbank went on, in the manner of a woman accustomed to looking facts in the face.

Miss Pynsent was very timid, but she adored the aristocracy, and there were elements in the boy's life which she was not prepared to sacrifice even to a person who represented such a possibility of grating bolts and clanking chains. 'I suppose we oughtn't to forget that his father was very high,' she suggested, appealingly, with her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

'His father? Who knows who he was? He doesn't set up for having a father, does he?'

'But, surely, wasn't it proved that Lord Frederick?'

'My dear woman, nothing was proved except that she stabbed his lordship in the back with a very long knife, that he died of the blow, and that she got the full sentence. What does such a piece as that know about fathers? The less said about the poor child's ancestors the better!'

This view of the case caused Miss Pynsent fairly to gasp, for it pushed over with a touch a certain tall imaginative structure which she had been piling up for years. Even as