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"Extraordinary, most extraordinary!" the professor was repeating. Then, when Mrs. Barbara felt she could bear it no longer, he went on to read out the foreign letter. It was from his son, Jinty's father, and told how his life had been recently in grave peril.
Besides, he had now scooped up the last scrap of Jinty's breakfast, and it behoved him to be up and doing some mischief. His bold black eye caught a gleam of silver, an opportunity ready to his beak. It was a quaint little Norwegian silver salt-cellar in the form of a swan. Mike, with his head on one side, considered the feasibility of removing that ancient Norse relic quietly.
"Ah well, bad as he is, Mike's British same's I am, and he do hate a foreigner!" said Mrs. Barbara appreciatively. Time went on and Jinty began to shoot up; she was growing quite tall, and Ah Lon also grew apace. But, still, though the little foreigner could now find her way about in the language of her new country, she shut her heart against kind little Jinty's advances.
"She won't have anything to say to me!" complained Jinty, "she won't make friends, Mrs. Barbara! The only thing she will look at is my pearl locket, she likes that!" Indeed Ah Lon seemed never tired of gazing at the pearl-rimmed locket which hung by a slender little chain round Jinty's neck, and contained the miniature of her pretty young mother so long dead.
"If that being's the girl Mr. William sent she's got to look as such in some of Miss Jinty's garments and immediately." So Ah Lon, trembling like a leaf, was carried off to be attired like a little English child. "But as for looking like one, that she never will!" Mrs.
He was little more than a dream-father, for he had been for most of Jinty's little life away in far-off China in the diplomatic service. Her sweet, young, gentle mother Jinty did not remember at all, for she dwelt in a land that is far-and-away farther off than China, a land: "Where loyal hearts and true Stand ever in the light, All rapture through and through In God's most holy sight."
It was a rebuff, and Jinty got many another as the days went on. Do what she could to please and amuse the little foreigner, Ah Lon shrank from her persistently. All Jinty's treasures, dolls and toys and keepsakes were exhibited, but Ah Lon turned away indifferently.
At last Mike made his final choice, and, out of pure contrariness, it was the bowl of hot bread and milk prepared for Jinty's breakfast from which he flatly refused to be elbowed away. "My pretty! Has it snatched the very cup from thy lip!" Mrs. Barbara's indignation boiled over against the bold audacious tyrant so abetted by its master and hers.
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