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Munt was sensible of an access of popularity in knowing Dan Mavering's people, and he did not spare his colours. "Then it isn't from his father that he gets everything. He isn't in the least shy," said Miss Cotton. "That must be the mother." "And the mother?" "The mother I don't know." Miss Cotton sighed. "Sometimes I wish that he did show a little more trepidation.
"Oh, do tell me about him, and all Mr. Mavering's family. We're so interested, you know, on account of Isn't it pretty to have that little love idyl going on here? I wonder I've been wondering all the time what she thinks of all this. Do you suppose she quite likes it? His costume is so very remarkable!"
Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave her hand to both the gentlemen without the affectation of surprise at seeing either. "I saw Mr. Munt coning up from the boat," she said in answer to Mavering's demand for some sort of astonishment from her. "I wasn't certain that it was you." Mrs.
She left the young couple to themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden Alice to be a little more with her. Alice had forgotten it too. She sat listening to Mavering's talk with a certain fascination, but not so much apparently because the meaning of the words pleased her as the sound of his voice, the motion of his lips in speaking, charmed her.
The picnic party gathered itself up after the lunch, and while some of the men, emulous of Mavering's public spirit, helped some of the ladies to pack the dishes and baskets away under the wagon seats, others threw a corked bottle into the water, and threw stones at it. A few of the ladies joined them, but nobody hit the bottle, which was finally left bobbing about on the tide. Mrs.
Oh, I assure you that, from what I hear, they've changed all that since our time, Mr. Mavering." Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she would have approved of in another. The result was apparent in the jocosity of this heavy Mr. Mavering's reply. "Well, then, I'm glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked generation.
Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice. Dan answered for him. "He never had such a chance before." Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering's room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house.
XXXIII: When she entered Mrs. Mavering's room Alice first saw the pictures, the bric-a-brac, the flowers, the dazzle of lights, and then the invalid propped among her pillows, and vividly expectant of her. She seemed all eager eyes to the girl, aware next of the strong resemblance to Dan in her features, and of the careful toilet the sick woman had made for her.
"Prefer to stand?" he asked by and by, after Mavering had remained standing in silence, with no signs of proposing to sit down or speak. Mavering glanced at the only chair in the room: Boardman's clothes dripped and dangled over it. "Throw 'em on the bed," he said, following Mavering's glance.
"But every one mayn't know it's gratitude." Alice went out, but she came back in a little while, and went up to her room without speaking to any one. The fits of elation and depression with which this first day passed for her succeeded one another during Mavering's stay. He did not need Alice's chaperonage long.
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