He took her hand again to walk on, and the great iron mouth was drawn a little to one side, and it looked as if the lips might have trembled if they had not been so tightly shut.  Perhaps Mr. Van Torp had never kissed a child before.

She was very happy and contented, for she had spent most of her life in a New England village alone with Miss More, and the great English country-house was full of wonder and mystery for her, and the park was certainly the Earthly Paradise.  She had hardly ever been with other children and was rather afraid of them, because they did not always understand what she said, as most grown people did; so she was not at all lonely now.  On the contrary, she felt that her small existence was ever so much fuller than before, since she now loved two people instead of only one, and the two people seemed to agree so well together.  In America she had only seen Mr. Van Torp at intervals, when he had appeared at the cottage near Boston, the bearer of toys and chocolates and other good things, and she had not been told till after she had landed in Liverpool that she was to be taken to stop with him in the country while he remained in England.  Till then he had always called her ‘Miss Ida,’ in an absurdly formal way, but ever since she had arrived at Oxley Paddox he had dropped the ‘Miss,’ and had never failed to spend two or three hours alone with her every day.  Though his manner had not changed much, and he treated her with a sort of queer formality, much as he would have behaved if she had been twenty years old instead of nine, she had been growing more and more sure that he loved her and would give her anything in the world she asked for, though there was really nothing she wanted; and in return she grew gratefully fond of him by quick degrees, till her affection expressed itself in her solemn proposal to ‘give him a kiss.’

Not long after that Mr. Van Torp found amongst his letters one from Lady Maud, of which the envelope was stamped with the address of her father’s country place, ‘Craythew.’  He read the contents carefully, and made a note in his pocket-book before tearing the sheet and the envelope into a number of small bits.

There was nothing very compromising in the note, but Mr. Van Torp certainly did not know that his butler regularly offered first and second prizes in the servants’ hall, every Saturday night, for the ‘best-put-together letters’ of the week—­to those of his satellites, in other words, who had been most successful in piecing together scraps from the master’s wastepaper basket.  In houses where the post-bag has a patent lock, of which the master keeps the key, this diversion has been found a good substitute for the more thrilling entertainment of steaming the letters and reading them before taking them upstairs.  If Mrs. Dubbs was aware of Mr. Crookes’ weekly distribution of rewards she took no notice of it; but as she rarely condescended to visit the lower regions, and only occasionally asked Mr. Crookes to dine in her own sitting-room, she may be allowed the benefit of the doubt; and, besides, she was a very superior person.