“I’ll never come with you again, Laurence, anywhere, when it has anything to do with business,” she declared.
“Who is ‘it’?” inquired Mr Cheviott, calmly.
“Laurence, you are not to tease me. I am too worried to stand it, I am, really,” she replied.
”‘It’ again! Alys, you are growing incorrigible. I really think my best plan would be to send you to a good school for a year or two – the sort of place where ‘young ladies of neglected education’ are taken in hand.”
He spoke so seriously that for a quarter of a second Alys wondered if he could be in earnest. She turned sharply round from the window against which she had been pressing her pretty face in a sort of affectation of babyish discontent, staring out at the leaden sky, and the wet street, and the dreary-looking gardens in the distance.
“Laurence!” she exclaimed. But Laurence’s next remark undeceived her.
“You should not flatten your face against the window-pane. You will spoil the shape of your nose, and you have made it look so red,” he observed, gravely. “Would you care to live, Alys, do you think, if you had a red nose?”
Alys gently stroked the ill-treated member as she answered, thoughtfully:
“I hardly think I should. Laurence, do you know there have been times when I have been afraid they might run in the family.”
“What?” asked Laurence, philosophically.
“Red noses,” answered Alys, calmly. “Aunt Winstanley has one, you know. She says its neuralgia, but I feel sure it is indigestion.”
Laurence looked up at her with a smile, which broke into a laugh as he observed the preternatural gravity of her expression.
“Come and sit down and have some breakfast, you absurd child,” he said. He was already seated at the table.
Alys walked slowly across the room, and took her place opposite him. She looked blooming enough notwithstanding all the trials she had had to endure. As the Western girls had pronounced her, such she was, very, very pretty – as pretty a girl as one could wish to see. Her soft dark hair grew low, but not too low, on the white, well-shaped forehead; her features were all good, and gave promise of maturing into even greater beauty than that of eighteen; her blue eyes could look up tenderly as well as brightly from under their long black eyelashes, for their colour was not of the cold steel-like shade that is often the peculiarity of blue eyes in such juxtaposition. But the tenderness was more a matter of the future than the present, for hitherto there had been little in her life to call forth the deeper tones of her character; she was happy, trustful and winning, full of life and vigour; incapable of a mean thought or action herself, incapable of suspecting such in others.
Mr Cheviott looked at her critically as she sat opposite him.
“Alys,” he said at last, “I am afraid I have not brought you up well.”
“What makes you think so all of a sudden, Laurence?”
“I am afraid you are spoiled. You are such a baby.”
Alys’s eyes flashed a little.
“Are you in earnest, Laurence?”
“A little, not quite.”
“I think you have got into the habit of thinking other people babies, and it’s a very bad habit. You like them to do just exactly what you tell them, and yet you laugh at them for being babies. You think Arthur is a baby too.”
“There are babies and babies,” Mr Cheviott replied. “Some do credit to those who bring them up, and some don’t.”
“Well, he does, whether I do or not,” said Alys, “he is as kind, and good, and nice, and sensible as he can be. And do you know what I think, Laurence? If there are different kinds of babies, there are different ways of being spoiled, and I sometimes think you are spoiled! I do,” she continued, shaking her head solemnly. “Arthur spoils you, and aunt of course does. I believe I am the only person that does not.”
“And how do you manage to steer clear of so fatal an error?”
“You are not nice, indeed you are extremely disagreeable when you speak like that,” said Alys, “but still I think I will tell you. I don’t spoil you because I don’t think you quite perfect as everybody else does,” and she glanced up at him defiantly.
Mr Cheviott laughed. He was just going to answer, when there came an interruption in the shape of his manservant.
“Letters!” exclaimed Alys, “I do hope there are some for me; they will give me something to do. Are there any for me, Laurence?”
“Yes, two, and only one for me.”
“From aunt and from Arthur,” said Alys. “I will read aunt’s first, there is never anything in hers. She just tells me over again what I told her, and makes little comments upon it. Yes, ‘so sorry, dearest Alys, that the weather in Paris has so spoiled the pleasure of your visit, and that during the last week you have scarcely been able to get out, except in a close carriage, for a miserable attempt at shopping. And so you enjoyed Madame de Briancourt’s ball on the whole, very much, and your pink and white grenadine looked lovely, and Clotilde did your hair the new way.’ Did you ever hear anything so absurd, Laurence? It is like reading all I have written over again in a looking-glass, only then the letters would be all the wrong way, wouldn’t they?”
But Mr Cheviott did not answer, and Alys, looking up, saw that he had not heard her; he was busily reading his own letter, and its contents did not seem to be satisfactory, for a frown had gathered on his brow, and, as he turned the first page, a half-smothered exclamation of annoyance escaped him.
“What is the matter, Laurence?” said Alys. “You don’t seem any better pleased with your letter than I am with mine?”
“How do you mean? What does he say to you?” inquired her brother, quickly.
“Who? Oh, Arthur, you mean. I haven’t opened his yet. I was saying how stupid aunt’s letters are. So yours is from Arthur, too, is it?” said Alys, pricking up her ears, “what’s the matter? Is he going to be married? I do wish he were.”
“Alys!” exclaimed Mr Cheviott, with real annoyance in his tone, “do be careful what you say. You are too old to talk so foolishly. It is unbecoming and unladylike.”
“Why? What do you mean?” said Alys, opening wide her blue eyes in astonishment. “Why shouldn’t I talk of Arthur’s being married? I have noticed before that you seem quite indignant at the thought of such a thing, and I don’t think you have any right to dictate to him. It’s just what I was saying, he has spoiled you by giving in so, and the more inches he gives you the more ells you want to take.”
“I have spoiled you, Alys, by allowing you to speak to me as you do. It is most unjustifiable; and the way you express yourself is worse than unladylike, it is vulgar and coarse.”
He got up and left the room. Never in all her life had Alys been so reproved before, and by him of all people, her dear, dear, Laurence – her father and mother and brother in one, as she often called him. She could not bear it; she threw aside the unlucky letters which in some way or other she felt to have been the cause of her distress, and burst into tears. She cried away quietly for some time, till it occurred to her to wonder more definitely in what way she had really displeased her brother, and the more she thought it over the more convinced she became that Arthur’s letter had been the primary cause of his annoyance, and her own remarks nothing worse than ill-timed and unwise.
“For I very often say much more impertinent things, and he only laughs,” she reflected.
There