The relief of the two women was sudden and unaffected.

“Oh, here you are, dearest, at last!” said Miss Tish eagerly.  “This is your guardian, Colonel Starbottle.  Come to him, dear!”

She took the hand of the child, who hung back with an odd mingling of shamefacedness and resentment of the interference, when the voice of Colonel Starbottle, in the same deadly calm deliberation, said,—­

“I—­er—­will speak with her—­alone.”

The round eyes again saw the complete collapse of authority, as the two women shrank back from the voice, and said hurriedly,—­

“Certainly, Colonel Starbottle; perhaps it would be better,” and ingloriously quitted the room.

But the colonel’s triumph left him helpless.  He was alone with a simple child, an unprecedented, unheard-of situation, which left him embarrassed and—­speechless.  Even his vanity was conscious that his oratorical periods, his methods, his very attitude, were powerless here.  The perspiration stood out on his forehead; he looked at her vaguely, and essayed a feeble smile.  The child saw his embarrassment, even as she had seen and understood his triumph, and the small woman within her exulted.  She put her little hands on her waist, and with the fingers turned downwards and outwards pressed them down her hips to her bended knees until they had forced her skirts into an egregious fullness before and behind, as if she were making a curtsy, and then jumped up and laughed.

“You did it!  Hooray!”

“Did what?” said the colonel, pleased yet mystified.

“Frightened ’em!—­the two old cats!  Frightened ’em outen their slippers!  Oh, jiminy!  Never, never, never before was they so skeert!  Never since school kept did they have to crawl like that!  They was skeert enough first when you come, but just now!—­Lordy!  They wasn’t a-goin’ to let you see me—­but they had to! had to!  Had to!” and she emphasized each repetition with a skip.

“I believe—­er,” said the colonel blandly, “that I—­er—­intimated with some firmness”—­

“That’s it—­just it!” interrupted the child delightedly.  “You—­you—­overdid ’em”

“What?”

“OVERDID ’em!  Don’t you know?  They’re always so high and mighty!  Kinder ’Don’t tech me.  My mother’s an angel; my father’s a king’—­all that sort of thing.  They did this”—­she drew herself up in a presumable imitation of the two women’s majestic entrance—­“and then,” she continued, “you—­you jest did this”—­here she lifted her chin, and puffing out her small chest, strode towards the colonel in evident simulation of his grandest manner.

A short, deep chuckle escaped him—­although the next moment his face became serious again.  But Pansy in the mean time had taken possession of his coat sleeve and was rubbing her cheek against it like a young colt.  At which the colonel succumbed feebly and sat down on the sofa, the child standing beside him, leaning over and transferring her little hands to the lapels of his frock coat, which she essayed to button over his chest as she looked into his murky eyes.