a position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one’s university honours had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren.  At any rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it was understood he would enter upon his duties within the week she would let him off now, he succeeded, in spite of the presence of the child, in squeezing out a phrase about the rate of payment.  It was not the fault of the conscious smile which seemed a reference to the lady’s expensive identity, it was not the fault of this demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if the allusion didn’t sound rather vulgar.  This was exactly because she became still more gracious to reply:  “Oh I can assure you that all that will be quite regular.”

Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what “all that” was to amount to—­people had such different ideas.  Mrs. Moreen’s words, however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the mocking foreign ejaculation “Oh la-la!”

Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to the window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the air in his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn’t play.  The young man wondered if he should be able to teach him to play, though his mother had said it would never do and that this was why school was impossible.  Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only continued blandly:  “Mr. Moreen will be delighted to meet your wishes.  As I told you, he has been called to London for a week.  As soon as he comes back you shall have it out with him.”

This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply, laughing as his hostess laughed:  “Oh I don’t imagine we shall have much of a battle.”

“They’ll give you anything you like,” the boy remarked unexpectedly, returning from the window.  “We don’t mind what anything costs—­we live awfully well.”

“My darling, you’re too quaint!” his mother exclaimed, putting out to caress him a practised but ineffectual hand.  He slipped out of it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face seemed to change its time of life.  At this moment it was infantine, yet it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and knowledges.  Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed to find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his teens.  Nevertheless he divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn’t prove a bore.  He would prove on the contrary a source of agitation.  This idea held the young man, in spite of a certain repulsion.

“You pompous little person!  We’re not extravagant!” Mrs. Moreen gaily protested, making another unsuccessful attempt to draw the boy to her side.  “You must know what to expect,” she went on to Pemberton.