But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that:  when he opened his mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly, “Darling, I do love you.”  He had done it the very night before, in Grand-Aunt Jeannie’s parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his father before he was born.  “It was not her fault.  My father didn’t stand by her.  He was all right about money.  But when he heard about the child, he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the Colonies.  And he didn’t come back.  So she lost her nerve”; and that he had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland.  She was dying to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly, “Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?”

The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered.  “How you see through me, dear!” she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate, charged with an astringent form of love.  “All that I wanted to say was simply that I am so very glad you have come.  Perhaps for reasons that you’ll consider tiresome of me.  But Richard has been so much away, and even when he’s at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the time, that I’ve often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house, who’d talk to me occasionally and be a companion.  Perhaps you’ll think it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much older.  But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.  You’re eighteen, aren’t you?”

“Eighteen past,” Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen.  But her birthday had been a fortnight ago.

“And I was nineteen when Richard was born.  So you see to me a girl of eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling everything.  So I hope you won’t mind if I treat you as an equal.”  She raised her wineglass and looked over its brim at the girl’s proud, solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour, bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the wineglass down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden tone.  “I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it or not.  I knew you’d like it.  You see, you get very evasive if you’ve ever been in a position like mine.  You have to make servants like you so that they won’t give notice when they hear the village gossip, because you must have a well-run house for your child.  You have to make people like you so that they will let the children play with yours.  So one gets into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without particularly worrying whether it’s sincere.  But this I find I really mean.”