“Why is my pretty pet so idle?” he asked, for while the wheel should whirl he could dream.

She made no answer, only turned her troubled, soft hazel eyes upon him.

“And have you seen a wolf, too, that you have lost your tongue?”

At the word “wolf” she burst into tears.  And then, discarding all caution in the breaking down of her reserve, she sprang up, overturning the wheel and rushing to his chair.

Now Richard Mivane had never encouraged his grandchildren to clamber over his chair.  He protested great fear of the sticky fingers of the more youthful in contact with his preternaturally fine clothes; he declared they reminded him of squirrels, which he detested; he was not sure they did not look like rats.  All this was of great effect; for his many contemptuous whimsical prejudices were earnestly respected.

For instance, whenever ’possum was served at the pioneer board they who partook carried their plates for the purpose to a side table.  “The look of the animal’s tail is enough for me—­it curls,” he would say.

“So does a pig’s tail curl,” his son used to remonstrate sensibly.

“Not having kept a straight course so long,—­then twirling up deceitfully like a second thought.  This fellow is a monstrosity,—­and his wife has a pocket for a cradle,—­and I don’t know who they are nor where they came from,—­they were left over from before the Flood, perhaps,—­they look somehow prehistoric to me.  I am not acquainted with the family.”

And turning his head aside he would wave away the dainty, the delight of the pioneer epicure time out of mind.

The diplomatic reason, however, that Richard Mivane was wont to shove off his grandchildren from the arm of that stately chair was that here they got on his blind side,—­his simple, grandfatherly, affectionate predilection.  The touch of them, their scrambling, floundering, little bodies, their soft pink cheeks laid against his, their golden hair in his clever eyes, their bright glances at close range,—­he was then like other men and could deny them nothing!  His selfishness, his vanity, his idleness, his frippery were annulled in the instant.  He was resolved into the simple constituent elements of a grandfather, one part doting folly, one part loving pride, and the rest leniency, and he was as wax in their hands.

None of them had so definitely realized this, accurately discriminating cause and effect, as Peninnah Penelope Anne.  She felt safe the moment that she was perched on the arm of her grandfather’s chair, her soft clasp about his stiff old neck, her tears flowing over her cheeks, all pink anew, escaping upon his wrinkled, bloodless, pale visage and taking all the starch out of his old-fashioned steinkirk.  He struggled futilely once or twice, but she only hugged him the closer.

“Oh, don’t let him go!  Oh, don’t let him go!” she cried.

“The wolf that we were talking about?  By no means!  Lovely creature that he is!  We’ll preserve, if you like, wolves instead of pheasants!  I remember a gentleman’s estate in Northumberland—­a little beyond the river”—­