“The less you expect the better!” her companion interposed.  “But we are people of fashion.”

“Only so far as you make us so!” Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked.  “Well then, on Friday—­don’t tell me you’re superstitious—­and mind you don’t fail us.  Then you’ll see us all.  I’m so sorry the girls are out.  I guess you’ll like the girls.  And, you know, I’ve another son, quite different from this one.”

“He tries to imitate me,” Morgan said to their friend.

“He tries?  Why he’s twenty years old!” cried Mrs. Moreen.

“You’re very witty,” Pemberton remarked to the child—­a proposition his mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan’s sallies to be the delight of the house.

The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the visitor, who was surprised afterwards that he hadn’t struck him as offensively forward:  “Do you want very much to come?”

“Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?” Pemberton replied.  Yet he didn’t want to come at all; he was coming because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune at the end of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant patrimony into a single full wave of experience.  He had had his full wave but couldn’t pay the score at his inn.  Moreover he had caught in the boy’s eyes the glimpse of a far-off appeal.

“Well, I’ll do the best I can for you,” said Morgan; with which he turned away again.  He passed out of one of the long windows; Pemberton saw him go and lean on the parapet of the terrace.  He remained there while the young man took leave of his mother, who, on Pemberton’s looking as if he expected a farewell from him, interposed with:  “Leave him, leave him; he’s so strange!” Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might say.  “He’s a genius—­you’ll love him,” she added.  “He’s much the most interesting person in the family.”  And before he could invent some civility to oppose to this she wound up with:  “But we’re all good, you know!”

“He’s a genius—­you’ll love him!” were words that recurred to our aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses were not invariably loveable.  However, it was all the better if there was an element that would make tutorship absorbing:  he had perhaps taken too much for granted it would only disgust him.  As he left the villa after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning over it.  “We shall have great larks!” he called up.

Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned:  “By the time you come back I shall have thought of something witty!”

This made Pemberton say to himself “After all he’s rather nice.”

CHAPTER II