“See,” he proceeded.  “Did Alf say there was any noos?” He admitted an uncertainty.  Furtively he looked at her, suspecting all the time that memory had betrayed him; but in his ancient way continuing to trust to Magic.

“Well, you didn’t seem to think much of what he did bring.  But I’ll tell you a bit of news, Pa.  And that is, that you’ve got a pair of the rummiest daughters I ever struck!”

Pa looked out from beneath his bushy grey eyebrows, resembling a worn and dilapidated perversion of Whistler’s portrait of Carlyle.  His eyelids seemed to work as he brooded upon her announcement.  It was as though, together, these two explored the Blanchard archives for confirmation of Jenny’s sweeping statement.  The Blanchards of several generations might have been imagined as flitting across a fantastic horizon, keening for their withered laurels, thrown into the shades by these more brighter eccentrics.  It was, or it might have been, a fascinating speculation.  But Pa did not indulge this antique vein for very long.  The moment and its concrete images beguiled him back to the daughter before him and the daughter who was engaged in an unexpected emotional treat.  He said: 

“I know,” and gave a wide grin that showed the gaps in his teeth as nothing else could have done—­not even the profoundest yawn.  Jenny was stunned by this evidence of brightness in her parent.

“Well, you’re a caution!” she cried.  “And to think of you sitting there saying it!  And I reckon they’ve got a pretty rummy old Pa—­if the truth was only known.”

Pa’s grin, if possible, stretched wider.  Again that terrible chuckle, which suggested a derangement of his internal parts, or the running-down of an overwound clock, wheezed across the startled air.

“Maybe,” Pa said, with some unpardonable complacency.  “Maybe.”

“Bless my soul!” exclaimed Jenny.  She could not be sure, when his manner returned to one of vacancy, and when the kitchen was silent, whether Pa and she had really talked thus, or whether she had dreamed their talk.  To her dying day she was never sure, for Pa certainly added nothing to the conversation thereafter.  Was it real?  Or had her too excited brain played her a trick?  Jenny pinched herself.  It was like a fairy tale, in which cats talk and little birds humanly sing, or the tiniest of fairies appear from behind clocks or from within flower-pots.  She looked at Pa with fresh awe.  There was no knowing where you had him!  He had the interest, for her, of one returned by miracle from other regions, gifted with preposterous knowledges....  He became at this instant fabulous, like Rip Van Winkle, or the Sleeping Beauty ... or the White Cat....